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Main Title Uncharted : big data as a lens on human culture /
Author Aiden, Erez.
Other Authors
Author Title of a Work
Michel, Jean-Baptiste.
Publisher Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA),
Year Published 2013
OCLC Number 837144847
ISBN 9781594487453; 1594487456; 1594632901; 9781594632907
Subjects Data mining ; Big data--Social aspects ; Internet--Social aspects ; Civilization, Modern ; Culture ; SCIENCE--History ; HISTORY--Social HISTORY ; SOCIAL SCIENCE--Popular Culture ; Kultursoziologie ; Massendaten
Additional Subjects Google (Firm)
Internet Access
Description Access URL
Cover image ftp://ppftpuser:welcome@ftp01.penguingroup.com/Booksellers and Media/Covers/2008_2009_New_Covers/9781594487453.jpg
Cover image ftp://ppftpuser:welcome@ftp01.penguingroup.com/Booksellers and Media/Covers/2008%5F2009%5FNew%5FCovers/9781594487453.jpg
Cover image ftp://ppftpuser:welcome@ftp01.penguingroup.com/BooksellersandMedia/Covers/2008_2009_New_Covers/9781594487453.jpg
Holdings
Library Call Number Additional Info Location Last
Modified
Checkout
Status
ELBM  QA76.9.D343A3385 2013 AWBERC Library/Cincinnati,OH 05/16/2017
Collation 280 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
Notes
Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-272) and index.
Contents Notes
Through The Looking Glass -- How many words is a picture worth? -- G.K. Zipf And The Fossil Hunters -- Burnt, baby, burnt -- Armchair Lexicographerologists -- Daddy, where do babysitters come from? -- 7.5 Minutes Of Fame -- One giant leapfrog for mankind -- The Sound Of Silence -- Two rights make another right -- The Persistence Of Memory -- Mommy, where do Martians come from? -- Utopia, Dystopia, and Dat(A)Topia. Our society has gone from writing snippets of information by hand to generating a vast flood of 1s and 0s that record almost every aspect of our lives: who we know, what we do, where we go, what we buy, and who we love. This year, the world will generate 5 zettabytes of data. (That's a five with twenty-one zeros after it.) Big data is revolutionizing the sciences, transforming the humanities, and renegotiating the boundary between industry and the ivory tower. What is emerging is a new way of understanding our world, our past, and possibly, our future. In Uncharted, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel tell the story of how they tapped into this sea of information to create a new kind of telescope: a tool that, instead of uncovering the motions of distant stars, charts trends in human history across the centuries. By teaming up with Google, they were able to analyze the text of millions of books. The result was a new field of research and a scientific tool, the Google Ngram Viewer, so groundbreaking that its public release made the front page of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Boston Globe, and so addictive that Mother Jones called it "the greatest timewaster in the history of the internet." Using this scope, Aiden and Michel -- and millions of users worldwide -- are beginning to see answers to a dizzying array of once intractable questions. How quickly does technology spread? Do we talk less about God today? When did people start "having sex" instead of "making love"? At what age do the most famous people become famous? How fast does grammar change? Which writers had their works most effectively censored by the Nazis? When did the spelling "donut" start replacing the venerable "doughnut"? Can we predict the future of human history? Who is better known -- Bill Clinton or the rutabaga? All over the world, new scopes are popping up, using big data to quantify the human experience at the grandest scales possible. Yet dangers lurk in this ocean of 1s and 0s -- threats to privacy and the specter of ubiquitous government surveillance. Aiden and Michel take readers on a voyage through these uncharted waters.