Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books
SciencePublished 17 December 2010Open access
Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team
Citations3,107
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
This work surveys the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000, and shows how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology and the pursuit of fame.
Abstract
We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing 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. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.
Keywords
Social SciencesArts and HumanitiesComputer Science
NatureInitial sequencing and analysis of the human genome
24,579 Citations2001Eric S. Lander, Lauren Linton +250 more
The results of an international collaboration to produce and make freely available a draft sequence of the human genome are reported and an initial analysis is presented, describing some of the insights that can be gleaned from the sequence.
NatureDetecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data
4,406 Citations2008Jeremy Ginsberg, Matthew H. Mohebbi +4 more
A method of analysing large numbers of Google search queries to track influenza-like illness in a population and accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States with a reporting lag of about one day is presented.
Annals of NeurosciencesMemory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology
2,809 Citations2013Hermann Ebbinghaus
The first scientific text on the psychology of memory, Hermann Ebbinghaus extended the province of systematic, experimental research to the higher mental processes.
LanguageFrom usage to grammar: The mind's response to repetition
2,703 Citations2006Joan Bybee
It is argued that high-frequency instances of constructions undergo grammaticization processes (which produce further change), function as the central members of categories formed by constructions, and retain their old forms longer than lower- frequencies instances under the pressure of newer formations.
Journal of Web SemanticsDBpedia - A crystallization point for the Web of Data
2,150 Citations2009Christian Bizer, Jens Lehmann +5 more
The extraction of the DBpedia knowledge base is described, the current status of interlinking DBpedia with other data sources on the Web is discussed, and an overview of applications that facilitate the Web of Data around DBpedia is given.
Language Variation and ChangeReflexes of grammar in patterns of language change
1,615 Citations1989Anthony Kroch
NeuronCognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory
1,304 Citations1998Brenda Milner, Larry R. Squire +1 more
The problems of cognitive neuroscience—the problems of perception, action, memory, attention, and consciousness on an intellectually satisfying biological level—offer the most difficult and the greatest challenge for the next millennium.
The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln AssociationMemory; a contribution to experimental psychology,
1,287 CitationsHermann Ebbinghaus
Webster's third new international dictionary of the English language, unabridged
953 Citations1971Philip B. Gove
This book is intended to be a guide to the use of this type of dictionary in the classroom and should not be used as a substitute for a manual.
ManAnthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations
717 Citations1985Dan Sperber
LinguaWords and rules
560 Citations1998Steven Pinker
A comparison of English to other languages shows that contrary to the connectionist account, default suffixation is not due to numerous regular words reinforcing a pattern in associative memory, but to a memory-independent, symbol-concatenating mental operation.
NatureQuantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language
527 Citations2007E. James Lieberman, Jean-Baptiste Michel +3 more
This study provides a quantitative analysis of the regularization process by which ancestral forms gradually yield to an emerging linguistic rule, and studies how the rate of regularization depends on the frequency of word usage.
Princeton University Press eBooksCultural Transmission and Evolution (MPB-16), Volume 16
381 Citations1981Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Marcus W. Feldman
The MIT Press eBooksThe Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution
359 Citations2006Partha Niyogi
Partha Niyogi investigates the roles of natural selection, communicative efficiency, and learning in the origin and evolution of language -- in particular, whether natural selection is necessary for the emergence of shared languages.
Choice Reviews OnlineThe great influenza: the epic story of the deadliest plague in history
318 Citations2004
An in-depth account of the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918, a plague that took the lives of millions of people around the world, examines the causes of the pandemic, its devastating impact on early twentieth-century society, and the lasting implications of the crisis and the scientific.
Bulletin of the American Mathematical SocietyJohn von Neumann 1903-1957
181 Citations1958Stanislaw M. Ulam
Adapting the Tesseract open source OCR engine for multilingual OCR
135 Citations2009Ray Smith, Daria Antonova +1 more
Effort has been concentrated on enabling generic multi-lingual operation such that negligible customization is required for a new language beyond providing a corpus of text.
Sociological MethodologyImplication Analysis: A Pragmatic Proposal for Linking Theory and Data in the Social Sciences
56 Citations2008Stanley Lieberson, Joel Horwich
This work describes a set of procedures for using empirical data to rigorously evaluate theories and hypotheses without resorting to the mimicking of hard science.