Culturomics

Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts. Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.

Not to be confused with Culturomics (microbiology).

Michel and Aiden helped create the Google Labs project Google Ngram Viewer which uses n-grams to analyze the Google Books digital library for cultural patterns in language use over time.

Because the Google Ngram data set is not an unbiased sample, and does not include metadata, there are several pitfalls when using it to study language or the popularity of terms. Medical literature accounts for a large, but shifting, share of the corpus, which does not take into account how often the literature is printed, or read.

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