Name: What we learned from 5 million books
Uploaded: 2011-09-20T15:38:56Z
Duration: 13 min 52 s
Description: Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books

What we learned from 5 million books

Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

Digitizing five million books—containing 500 billion words—lets researchers spot patterns and shifts in language, fame, and history on a massive scale. This vast dataset, longer than the human genome, uncovers how cultural trends rise and fall, from the changing use of verbs to the fleeting obsession with specific years. The project even detects censorship and propaganda by tracing sudden drops in an individual's literary mention. With tools like the Ngram Viewer, anyone can explore how language captures the pulse of society across centuries.