No surprise: a lot. In this TEDxBoston talk, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden offer an entertaining and insightful overview of the computations they have been running on 5 million books scanned by Google. Those 5 million books offer up more than 500 billion words published over hundreds of years and the patterns they reveal are fascinating. The video is only about 14 minutes long, so I won’t spoil any of the highlights by writing about them here. It’s well worth your time to watch the whole thing.
Many thanks to Brain Pickings for pointing this one out.
Jeff
Wow, really enjoyed this video!!
Great video – I wonder if there have been culturomics studies of corporate cultures.