Science invades the humanities
WHEN Google began scanning books and allowing them to be searched online in 2004, publishers fretted that their literary treasure would be ransacked by internet pirates. Readers, meanwhile, revelled in the prospect of instant access to innumerable publications, some of them unavailable by other means. But Google Books is also responsible for another, quieter revolution: in the humanities.
For centuries, researchers interested in tracking cultural and linguistic trends were resigned to the laborious process of perusing volumes one by one. A single person, or indeed a team of people, can read only so many books. Large-scale number-crunching seemed an impossible task. Now, though, Jean-Baptiste Michel, of Harvard University, and his colleagues have used Google Books to do just that. They report their first results in this week’s Science. …
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