Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture

✍ Scribed by Aiden, Erez; Michel, Jean-Baptiste

• Book ID: 107808286
• Publisher: Penguin Group US
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 5 MB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781101632116

✦ Synopsis

Breaking open Big Data, two Harvard scientists reveal a ground-breaking way of looking at history and culture.

One of the greatest untapped resources of today isn't offshore oil or natural gas—it's data. Gigabytes, exabytes (that's one quintillion bytes) of data are sitting on servers across the world. So how can we start to access this explosion of information, this "big data," and what can it tell us?

Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel are two young scientists at Harvard who started to ask those questions. They teamed up with Google to create the Ngram Viewer, a Web-based tool that can chart words throughout the massive Google Books archive, sifting through billions of words to find fascinating cultural trends. On the day that the Ngram Viewer debuted in 2010, more than one million queries were run through it.

On the front lines of Big Data, Aiden and Michel realized that this big dataset—the Google Books archive that contains...