Today I stumbled across an interesting find at slashdot.org, well I didn't so much stumble as i read their posts every few days. Google has been working on a project called the Google Books Ngram Viewer that has basically converted the human history worth of books into a digital format so that the text could be studied. This marks a breakthrough for social scientists, linguists, and a world worth of scholars. The tool is fun to play with as well. Since 2004 Google has indexed 5 million books with over 500 billion words into their databases. Since the advent of the Encyclopedia Britannica the English language has evolved and our daily lexicon has changed by leaps and bounds since the turn of the millennium. In the day of texting, emails, and heavy use of acronyms our language has become vastly different than the spoken English of the 1900s. This link to Discover Magazine delves deeper into the rabbit hole that is the cultural genome. The reading may be on the dry side, but it is no less exciting. I could easily geek out at explaining the feat it is to document and index so much knowledge, I am then reminded of an episode of Eureka that featured a similar phenomenon. So, follow the link and enjoy searching through HISTORY!
*Note* At the bottom of the search there is a grid filled with links of time periods, click the links and you will receive a list of books from that era.
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