 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
Books Google Technology

Google Books Makes a Word Cloud of Human History 127

Posted by Soulskill
from the trends-for-books dept.
An anonymous reader writes "From Ed Yong at the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog: 'Just as petrified fossils tell us about the evolution of life on earth, the words written in books narrate the history of humanity. The words tell a story, not just through the sentences they form, but in how often they occur. Uncovering those tales isn't easy — you'd need to convert books into a digital format so that their text can be analyzed and compared. And you'd need to do that for millions of books. Fortunately, that's exactly what Google have been doing since 2004.' Yong goes on to explain that the astounding record of human culture found in Google Books offers new research paths to social scientists, linguists, and humanities scholars. Some of the early findings (abstract), based on an analysis of 5 million books containing 500 billion words: English is still adding words at a breathtaking pace; grammar is evolving and often becoming more regular; we're forgetting our history more quickly; and celebrities are younger than they used to be. You can also play with the Google Books search tool yourself. For example, here's a neat comparison of how often the words Britannica and Wikipedia have appeared."
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Google Books Makes a Word Cloud of Human History

Comments Filter:

egrep -n '^[a-z].*\(' $ | sort -t':' +2.0

Working...
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/17/1855247/Google-Books-Makes-a-Word-Cloud-of-Human-History
news.slashdot.org
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-35
262419
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:VIRXE53JIICJMZKQHWKUU3FLBPPV2CWK
<urn:uuid:415ae295-450b-484d-ae4c-cc898474749b>
2014-08-22T13:50:02Z
216.34.181.48
sha1:AA5DI6H5CA7SQVLCQ2U5V7UQ2CJ6SPGQ
<urn:uuid:7ce89178-7454-48ed-b850-48994ab80ea0>
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/12/17/1855247/Google-Books-Makes-a-Word-Cloud-of-Human-History
response
<urn:uuid:cf393e98-0512-4b10-bb03-767b18fd8495>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-180-136-8.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-35
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for August 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf