What we learned from 5 million books - Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel
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TED Talk
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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. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)
Additional Resources for you to Explore
Try out the Ngram viewer, an interactive tool that displays a graphs showing how specific phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over a selected time span. With this cool Google tool, you can enter in different words or expressions and visually understand trends in their usage.
The Ngram viewer gets its data from Google Books - which in turn gets its data from the Partner Program and the Library Project.
Find out more about Erez Lieberman Aiden's work in culturomics in the Nature article, "Word Play."
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- Speaker Erez Lieberman Aiden , Jean-Baptiste Michel
