culturomics

12.16: news.adds/culturomics:

Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books

"( We constructed a corpus of digitized texts
containing [5 million books]
about 4% of all books ever printed.

Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate
cultural trends quantitatively.
We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics",
focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena
that were reflected in the English language
between 1800 and 2000.
We show how this approach can provide insights about
fields as diverse as lexicography,
the evolution of grammar, collective memory,
the adoption of technology, the pursuit of
fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology.)

Google Tool Explores 'Genome' Of English Words

. To coincide with the publication of the Science paper,
Google's ngrams web app shows how often
a word or phrase has appeared over time
in its scanned literature .
Dr Jean-Baptiste Michel a psychologist in Harvard's
Program for Evolutionary Dynamics,
and Dr Erez Lieberman Aiden
have developed the search tool .

. 8,500 new words enter the English language every year
and the lexicon grew by 70% between 1950 and 2000.
But 52% these words do not appear in dictionaries.
– the majority of words used in English books .