Google's 'fossil record' digitises 5 million books - science-in-society - 16 December 2010 - New Scientist: "For the first time, humanities scholars can crunch numbers with the best of their natural-science colleagues, thanks to Google's 'fossil record' of 5 million books, spanning 500 years.
Already, researchers have traced the accelerating evolution of the English language, mapped the rise and fall of various people, and uncovered patterns of censorship and suppression in Soviet Russia, modern China, and 1950s America – and that's only a beginning.
'This dataset is going to underwrite a field which is far, far more interesting than anything we could talk about in a single paper,' says Erez Lieberman Aiden, an applied mathematician and bioengineer at Harvard University who led the research along with Jean-Baptiste Michel, also of Harvard."
