Big Data — and how we use it — is changing the way we understand our culture and history. Research scientists Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean Baptiste Michel (Uncharted: Big Data as Lens on Human Culture) teamed up with Google to create the (highly addictive) Ngram Viewer: it sifts through millions of digitized books and charts the frequency with which words have been used. Aiden and Michel call their method of combing through text to map cultural trends “culturomics.” “It’s like genomics but with culture,” Aiden tells Kurt Andersen.
