Digitized Books Pioneer the Field of 'Culturomics' (5 of 5) (IMAGE)
Caption
Books are an important part of our cultural genome, the information that we pass on from generation to generation. "Culturomics" studies the evolution of human culture quantitatively, in this instance by using books as a 'fossil record' of previous generations. Here we visually represent the words that appear in contemporary English books; the size of each word is its frequency in published books. The most common words, such as "the" and "a," are omitted. This image relates to an article that appeared in the Dec. 16, 2010, issue of Science Express, published by AAAS. The study, by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Michel at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues was titled, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books."
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