The word “God” peaked in usage in the world’s books about 1830. “Women” overtook “men” in print after 1985. Sigmund Freud has gotten more ink in the past 60 years than Charles Darwin or Albert Einstein.
Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teamed up with Google Inc. to survey 5.2 million digitized books -- about 4 percent of all the volumes published in any language -- to analyze language patterns and quantify cultural trends from 1800 to 2000. The four-year project is described today in the journal Science.
The Harvard researchers dub their discipline “culturomics” -- evoking genomics, in which scientists use billions of bits of quantitative data to study genes. Google, which has digitized 12 percent of the 130 million books published worldwide, unveiled today an online tool that enables users to track the frequency of words and phrases.
About 72 percent of the database’s text is in English, followed by French, Spanish, German, Chinese, Russian, and Hebrew. It’s the largest data release in the history of humanities and is available for download, Michel said.
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