Culturomics

They call it culturomics: the obvious play on the word "genomics" looks at trends in human thought and culture. But scientists say culturomics has been hampered by a lack of quantitative data. So researchers at Harvard, along with Google, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the American Heritage Dictionary, have come up with a new tool. It's a database of 5.2 million books, published since the year 1500. That's four percent of all the books ever published, with a total of 500 billion words. The focus is on English language culture, so three-quarters of the books are in English. Among the first findings of the research, published in the journal Science: about, 8500 new words enter the English language annually. But many of them don't end up in dictionaries . And about fame - actors become famous around age 30, writers around 40, and politicians around 50. But the fame of politicians can eventually exceed that of actors. A Google tool called the Books Ngram Viewer is available based on this data - users can track the usage and frequency of a word or phrase over the past few centuries. Thus, we can watch the fall and rise of Melville. And soon the rise and fall of Snooki.