Construct a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed, and then analyze that corpus using advanced software and the investigatory curiosity of thousands, and you get something called "Culturomics," a field in which cultural trends are represented quantitatively.
In this talk Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel — co-founders of the Cultural Observatory at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google — show how culturomics 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.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2011/05/Culturomics
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