Uncharted
Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture
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- € 3,99
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- € 3,99
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“One of the most exciting developments from the world of ideas in decades, presented with panache by two frighteningly brilliant, endearingly unpretentious, and endlessly creative young scientists.” – Steven Pinker, author of The Better Angels of Our Nature
Our society has gone from writing snippets of information by hand to generating a vast flood of 1s and 0s that record almost every aspect of our lives: who we know, what we do, where we go, what we buy, and who we love. This year, the world will generate 5 zettabytes of data. (That’s a five with twenty-one zeros after it.) Big data is revolutionizing the sciences, transforming the humanities, and renegotiating the boundary between industry and the ivory tower.
What is emerging is a new way of understanding our world, our past, and possibly, our future. In Uncharted, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel tell the story of how they tapped into this sea of information to create a new kind of telescope: a tool that, instead of uncovering the motions of distant stars, charts trends in human history across the centuries. By teaming up with Google, they were able to analyze the text of millions of books. The result was a new field of research and a scientific tool, the Google Ngram Viewer, so groundbreaking that its public release made the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, and so addictive that Mother Jones called it “the greatest timewaster in the history of the internet.”
Using this scope, Aiden and Michel—and millions of users worldwide—are beginning to see answers to a dizzying array of once intractable questions. How quickly does technology spread? Do we talk less about God today? When did people start “having sex” instead of “making love”? At what age do the most famous people become famous? How fast does grammar change? Which writers had their works most effectively censored by the Nazis? When did the spelling “donut” start replacing the venerable “doughnut”? Can we predict the future of human history? Who is better known—Bill Clinton or the rutabaga?
All over the world, new scopes are popping up, using big data to quantify the human experience at the grandest scales possible. Yet dangers lurk in this ocean of 1s and 0s—threats to privacy and the specter of ubiquitous government surveillance. Aiden and Michel take readers on a voyage through these uncharted waters.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Aiden and Michel gained widespread media attention when they first demonstrated their innovative use of the Google Books project, which made available more than 30 million books in digitized form about one in every four books published. This "big data" is at the core of this fascinating glimpse into the pair's decade-long work and how "n the coming decades, personal, digital, and historical records are going to totally transform the way we think about ourselves and the world around us." Using a new scientific tool specially designed to be used with Google Books, the Ngram viewer, the pair were able to count words for "track certain kinds of cultural change over time" and to make "careful measurements that probe important aspects of our history, language, and culture." The result is like using a new kind of telescope that allows one to see more closely and accurately the evolution of words and how this reflects cultural change. A long appendix of charts provides a range of fascinating Ngram-based insights as well such as the fact that the word "data" over the past hundred years has become more commonly used than the word "God."