Uncharted
In this episode of Internet Origins, we explore Uncharted by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel—the story of how two Harvard researchers transformed Google's digitized books into a cultural telescope, making it possible to track the evolution of language and ideas across five centuries.
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Episode Notes
Google Ngram Viewer displays user-selected words or phrases (ngrams) in a graph that shows how those phrases have occurred in a corpus. Google Ngram Viewer's corpus is made up of the scanned books available in Google Books.
Transcript
Bot generated, may contain mistakes.
00:07 - 00:20 How do you study culture? While scientists have experimentation, historians have books. Reading widely, thinking deeply, and drawing insights from decades of study. But what if culture could be measured?
00:21 - 00:50 What if we could track the evolution of ideas with the same precision that physicists track the motion of planets? In 2007, the opportunity emerged. Google had quietly scanned 30 million books from libraries worldwide, five centuries of human thought compressed onto hard drives, and two graduate students persuaded the company to transform this library into something new, a dataset tracking words and phrases year by year. A telescope for culture.
00:50 - 01:18 Part 1. Word Fossils In 2005, Erez Lieberman and Jean-Baptiste Michel found themselves stuck on a question that any child might ask. Why do we say drove and not drived? They were graduate students at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, an unusual place where mathematicians worked alongside linguists, where cancer researchers talked to physicists, all trying to understand how complex systems change over time.
