So the guys at Google, MIT and Harvard have been thinking about the phrase 'Is a picture worth 1000 words" and well, two guys, Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden, have the outcome that it is not worth 1000 words... It is worth 500 BILLION words!!
Google is currently in the process of digitizing books and publishing them online. So far they have digitized 15 million books. I thought this was a lot, until they uncovered that 15 million was only 12%!! So they've got a fair way to go.
What this digitization has enabled is that you can now analyse what words people have written in their books from centuries ago and compare that to what people have written in their books recently. This allows trends to be picked out to see what everyone is writing about. The way of analysing this is by the use of Ngrams - a new way of picking out and underlining key trends of words! A key tool i'm sure if you're looking to do that?
A phrase called culturomic came up in this video, it is the application of massive scale data collection and analysis of the study of human culture. Apparently everyone can do this, but to me, hearing it for the first time.. What does this mean!?
The link for this video is below.. Have a click and have a look.
http://www.ted.com/playlists/56/making_sense_of_too_much_data.html - Look for the second video in the playlist "Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden: What we learned from 5 million books"
No comments:
Post a Comment