Have you seen this video on TED? “What we learned from 5 million books” video on TED.
The idea is dead simple but only the Fourth Revolution would allow it. Based on Google’s now huge and unprecendented database of scanned books, researchers have setup a tool that looks for the frequency of words depending on the date of publication.
The 5 million of books they use as a basis is quite a representative sample (4%) of the 129 million books ever published.
Not only that, but the tool is available online at http://books.google.com/ngrams, an interactive tool that lets you test your own words or combination of words, and look at how they evolve over time. I can testify that you can spend some time playing with it (and that’s an understatement). I just put here three examples I have done myself – all graphs range from 1800 to 2008
In the first example, using the frequency of the words “farmer”, “worker”, “employee”, “servant” and “slave”, we see how the concept of servant (yellow) disappears over time, while “workers” (red) and “employees” (green) are newer concepts.
In the second example, with the words “spiritual”, “intellectual” and “emotional”, we see how the frequency of “spiritual” diminishes after 1860, while “emotional” is quite a new word growing through the 20th century.
In the third example, we just watch the Fourth Revolution ignite, with the words “collaborative” and “networking”:
The incredible thing is that you can yourself do your own research, because the data from the 5 million books (approximately 500 billion words!!) is there, at the reach of your mouse, anywhere in the world.
I write about the Fourth Revolution but that does not mean I am not WOW’d by it regularly. WOW! Try it yourself on Google n-grams interactive site. And watch – the more this tool will become known, the more people will use its graphs to illustrate historical tendencies. Private people will do their own research. Humankind’s collective cognitive capability will be unleashed.
What a better illustration of the Fourth Revolution? This would have just been impossible 2 years ago. WOW.
