Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology

Computational lexicology

Computational lexicology is that branch of computational linguistics, which is concerned with the use of computers in the study of lexicon. It has been more narrowly described by some scholars as the use of computers in the study of machine-readable dictionaries...

 that studies human behavior

Human behavior

Human behavior refers to the range of behaviors exhibited by humans and which are influenced by culture, attitudes, emotions, values, ethics, authority, rapport, hypnosis, persuasion, coercion and/or genetics....

 and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis

Quantitative analysis

Quantitative analysis may refer to:* Quantitative analysis , an analysis technique applying mathematics stochastic calculus to finance...

 of digitized texts. Researchers data mine

Data mining

Data mining , a relatively young and interdisciplinary field of computer science is the process of discovering new patterns from large data sets involving methods at the intersection of artificial intelligence, machine learning, statistics and database systems...

 large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science

Science (journal)

Science is the academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and is one of the world's top scientific journals....

article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden. Michel and Aiden helped create the Google Labs

Google Labs

Google Labs was a page created by Google to demonstrate and test new Google projects. Google calls Google Labs,Google also uses an invitation-only phase for trusted testers to test projects including Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Wave and many of these have their own "labs" webpages for...

 project Google Ngram Viewer which uses n-gram

N-gram

In the fields of computational linguistics and probability, an n-gram is a contiguous sequence of n items from a given sequence of text or speech. The items in question can be phonemes, syllables, letters, words or base pairs according to the application...

's to analyze the Google Book

Google book

Google book may refer to:* Google Book Search, a Web-based search engine for paper books* The Google Book, a 1913 children's story...

 digital library for cultural patterns in language use over time. In another study called Culturnomics 2.0, Kalev H. Leetaru examined news archives including print and broadcast media (television and radio transcripts) for words that imparted tone or "mood" as well as geographic data. The research was able to retroactively predict the 2011 Arab Spring

Arab Spring

The Arab Spring , otherwise known as the Arab Awakening, is a revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests occurring in the Arab world that began on Saturday, 18 December 2010...

 and successfully estimate the final location of Osama Bin Laden

Osama bin Laden

Osama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden was the founder of the militant Islamist organization Al-Qaeda, the jihadist organization responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States and numerous other mass-casualty attacks against civilian and military targets...

to within 124 miles.

External links

• Culturomics.org, website by The Cultural Observatory at Harvard directed by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel