What We Learned From Five Million Books
Here’s a really fascinating TED talk where Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel explain how they’ve used Google’s book digitization effort to identify cultural trends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdhJwLJcdsU
What’s really interesting is that their work resulted in the Google Labs tool Books Ngram Viewer which is like Google Trends, only for books, and dating back to year 1500. For instance, it looks like things aren’t as wonderful and glorious as they once were:
