Blog
The latest news from Google AI
Culturomics, Ngrams and new power tools for Science
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Posted by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, Visiting Faculty at Google
Four years ago, we set out to create a research engine that would help people explore our cultural history by statistically analyzing the world’s books. In January 2011, the resulting method,
culturomics
, was featured on the cover of the journal
Science
. More importantly, Google implemented and launched a web-based version of our prototype research engine, the Google Books Ngram Viewer.
Now scientists, scholars, and web surfers around the world can take advantage of the Ngram Viewer to study a vast array of phenomena. And that's exactly what they've done. Here are a few of our favorite examples.
Poverty
Martin Ravallion, head of the Development Research Group at the World Bank, has been using the ngrams to study the history of poverty. In a
paper
published in the journal Poverty and Public Policy, he argues for the existence of two ‘poverty enlightenments’ marked by increased awareness of the problem: one towards the end of the 18th century, and another in the 1970s and 80s. But he makes the point that only the second of these enlightenments brought with it a truly enlightened idea: that poverty can be and should be completely
eradicated
.
The Science Hall of Fame
Adrian Veres and John Bohannon wondered who the most famous scientists of the past two centuries were. But there was no hall of fame for scientists, or a committee that determines who deserves to get into such a hall. So they used the ngrams data to define a metric for celebrity – the milliDarwin – and algorithmically created a
Science Hall of Fame
listing the most famous scientists born since 1800. They found that things like a popular book or a major controversy did more to increase discussion of a scientist than, for instance, winning a Nobel Prize.
(Other users have been exploring the history of particular sciences with the Ngram Viewer, covering everything from
neuroscience
to the
nuclear
age.)
The History of Typography
When we introduced the Ngram Viewer, we pointed out some potential pitfalls with the data. For instance, the ‘medial s’ ( ſ ), an older form of the letter s that looked like an integral sign and appeared in the beginning or middle of words, tends to be classified as an instance of the letter ‘f’ by the OCR algorithm used to create our version of the data. Andrew West, blogging at
Babelstone
, found a clever way to exploit this error: using queries like ‘husband’ and ‘hufband’ to study the history of medial s typography, he pinned down the precise moment when the medial s disappeared from English (around 1800), French (1780), and Spanish (1760).
People are clearly having a good time with the Ngram Viewer, and they have been learning a few things about science and history in the process. Indeed, the tool has proven so popular and so useful that Google recently announced that its imminent graduation from Google Labs to become a permanent part of Google Books.
Similar ‘big data’ approaches can also be applied to a wide variety of other problems. From books to maps to the structure of the web itself, 'the world's information' is one amazing dataset.
Erez Lieberman Aiden is Visiting Faculty at Google and a Fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows. Jean-Baptiste Michel is Visiting Faculty at Google and a Postdoctoral Fellow in Harvard's Department of Psychology.
Labels
accessibility
ACL
ACM
Acoustic Modeling
Adaptive Data Analysis
ads
adsense
adwords
Africa
AI
Algorithms
Android
Android Wear
API
App Engine
App Inventor
April Fools
Art
Audio
Augmented Reality
Australia
Automatic Speech Recognition
Awards
Cantonese
Chemistry
China
Chrome
Cloud Computing
Collaboration
Computational Imaging
Computational Photography
Computer Science
Computer Vision
conference
conferences
Conservation
correlate
Course Builder
crowd-sourcing
CVPR
Data Center
Data Discovery
data science
datasets
Deep Learning
DeepDream
DeepMind
distributed systems
Diversity
Earth Engine
economics
Education
Electronic Commerce and Algorithms
electronics
EMEA
EMNLP
Encryption
entities
Entity Salience
Environment
Europe
Exacycle
Expander
Faculty Institute
Faculty Summit
Flu Trends
Fusion Tables
gamification
Gboard
Gmail
Google Accelerated Science
Google Books
Google Brain
Google Cloud Platform
Google Docs
Google Drive
Google Genomics
Google Maps
Google Photos
Google Play Apps
Google Science Fair
Google Sheets
Google Translate
Google Trips
Google Voice Search
Google+
Government
grants
Graph
Graph Mining
Hardware
HCI
Health
High Dynamic Range Imaging
ICLR
ICML
ICSE
Image Annotation
Image Classification
Image Processing
Inbox
India
Information Retrieval
internationalization
Internet of Things
Interspeech
IPython
Journalism
jsm
jsm2011
K-12
KDD
Keyboard Input
Klingon
Korean
Labs
Linear Optimization
localization
Low-Light Photography
Machine Hearing
Machine Intelligence
Machine Learning
Machine Perception
Machine Translation
Magenta
MapReduce
market algorithms
Market Research
Mixed Reality
ML
MOOC
Moore's Law
Multimodal Learning
NAACL
Natural Language Processing
Natural Language Understanding
Network Management
Networks
Neural Networks
Nexus
Ngram
NIPS
NLP
On-device Learning
open source
operating systems
Optical Character Recognition
optimization
osdi
osdi10
patents
Peer Review
ph.d. fellowship
PhD Fellowship
PhotoScan
Physics
PiLab
Pixel
Policy
Professional Development
Proposals
Public Data Explorer
publication
Publications
Quantum AI
Quantum Computing
renewable energy
Research
Research Awards
resource optimization
Robotics
schema.org
Search
search ads
Security and Privacy
Semantic Models
Semi-supervised Learning
SIGCOMM
SIGMOD
Site Reliability Engineering
Social Networks
Software
Speech
Speech Recognition
statistics
Structured Data
Style Transfer
Supervised Learning
Systems
TensorBoard
TensorFlow
TPU
Translate
trends
TTS
TV
UI
University Relations
UNIX
User Experience
video
Video Analysis
Virtual Reality
Vision Research
Visiting Faculty
Visualization
VLDB
Voice Search
Wiki
wikipedia
WWW
YouTube
Archive
2018
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2017
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2016
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
2007
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Feb
2006
Dec
Nov
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
Apr
Mar
Feb
Feed
Google
on
Follow @googleai
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
