Culturomics: hard + soft science using the Ngram viewer

Google ?????Google Refrigerator?
Google ?????Google Refrigerator? (Photo credit: Aray Chen)

I’ve been playing around with the new Google N Gram viewer and the emerging field of culturomics, the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. It’s interesting to see that Timothy was more common in 1920 and that information has grown faster than knowledge :) In 500 Billion Words, a New Window on Culture – NYTimes.com.

Google NGram viewer taps 500 billion words to uncover cultural trends

English: A graph showing the frequency of semi...
English: A graph showing the frequency of semicolon use in English between 1500 and 2008. Data is from the Google Books corpus. The graph was created using the Google Books Ngram Viewer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In 500 Billion Words, a New Window on Culture – NYTimes.com.

Google Ngram Viewer: Sciences vs. Religion

Usage statistics from English books, according...
Usage statistics from English books, according to Google Ngram Viewer. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Google Ngram Viewer.