Understanding Culturomics and Its Impact

Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel explore the concept of a picture's worth in words, concluding that some pictures are worth 500 billion words. They discuss Google's digitization of millions of books, enabling computational analysis of cultural trends through n-grams. The talk highlights the potential of culturomics, a method for studying human culture using large-scale data analysis, and the public availability of the Ngram Viewer for exploring these trends.

What was the main question Harvard researchers were exploring about pictures?

• The technological advancements in photography

• The historical significance of pictures

• If a picture is truly worth a thousand words

• How to create more detailed pictures

What was the practical solution to reading millions of books?

• Summarizing books manually

• Building larger libraries

• Hiring more researchers

• Using computational methods to analyze digitized books

What is an n-gram in the context of this research?

• A type of book

• A statistical measure of word frequency

• A new language

• A historical document

How did the researchers use n-grams to analyze cultural trends?

• By comparing them to modern art

• By creating new languages

• By measuring the frequency of words and phrases over time

• By translating them into different languages

What career advice is given based on the analysis of fame?

• Become a mathematician for early fame

• Start as a scientist for immediate recognition

• Avoid politics for long-term fame

• Choose acting for early fame

What unusual pattern was observed in Marc Chagall's fame?

• A steady increase in fame

• A sudden drop in fame during Nazi Germany

• Consistent fame across all languages

• A rapid rise in fame after 1945

What is the suppression index used for?

• To determine the age of historical documents

• To calculate the number of books digitized

• To identify censorship and propaganda effects

• To measure the popularity of books

What is culturomics compared to in the transcript?

• Physics

• Mathematics

• Genomics

• Astronomy

What tool did Google develop to make culturomics accessible?

• A new search engine

• The Ngram Viewer

• A digital library

• A language translation app

What percentage of all books ever published has Google digitized?

• 5%

• 12%

• 25%

• 50%