What we learned from 5 million books - Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel
- 48,464 Views
- 2,862 Questions Answered
- TED Talk
Let’s Begin…
Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words. (Filmed at TEDxBoston.)
Create and share a new lesson based on this one.
Additional Resources for you to Explore
Try out the Ngram viewer, an interactive tool that displays a graphs showing how specific phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over a selected time span. With this cool Google tool, you can enter in different words or expressions and visually understand trends in their usage.
The Ngram viewer gets its data from Google Books - which in turn gets its data from the Partner Program and the Library Project.
Find out more about Erez Lieberman Aiden's work in culturomics in the Nature article, "Word Play."

TED-Ed
Lesson Creator
New York, NY
Create and share a new lesson based on this one.
More from Playing with Language
317,145 Views
699,102 Views
380,839 Views
2,058,085 Views