A New Way to Look at the Past

March 8, 2012

In a powerful new approach to scholarship, researchers at Harvard are creating a digital “fossil record” of human culture by tracking the frequency with which words appear in digitized books. Culturomics, a searchable tool developed by a team led by Erez Lieberman-Aiden, junior fellow of the Harvard Society of Fellows, and Jean-Baptiste Michel, post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, that included researchers from Harvard, Google, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary, pinpoints undiscovered trends in history, culture, language, and thought.

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