Google creates a tool to probe ‘genome’ of English words for cultural trends

How many words in the English language never make it into dictionaries? How has the nature of fame changed in the past 200 years? How do scientists and actors compare in their impact on popular culture?These are just some of the questions that researchers and members of the public can now answer using a new online tool developed by Google with the help of scientists at Harvard University. The massive searchable database is being hailed as the key to a new era of research in the humanities, linguistics and social sciences that has been dubbed “culturomics”.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/16/google-tool-english-cultural-trendsAlso see:Word-Wide Web Launches: New Google Database Puts Centuries of Cultural Trends in Reach of Linguists
Language analysts, sifting through two centuries of words in the millions of books in Google Inc.’s growing digital library, found a new way to track the arc of fame, the effect of censorship, the spread of inventions and the explosive growth of new terms in the English-speaking world.In research reported Thursday in the journal Science, the scientists at Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Google and the Encyclopedia Britannica unveiled a database of two billion words and phrases drawn from 5.2 million books in Google’s digital library published during the past 200 years. With this tool, researchers can measure trends through the language authors used and the names of people they mentioned.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704073804576023741849922006.htmlIn 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture
With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen. It consists of the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html