1. Lecture/Studio:
Culturomics
Prof. Alvarado
MDST 3703/7703
1 November 2012

2. Business
• Everyone’s families and friends OK?

3. Review
• The New Epistemology
– Rise of Big Data: massive, available, social
– Shifts our relationship to primary sources
– From reading to quantitative methods and
visualizations
– Example of media determinism
• Manovich
– Consistent with database logic
– Applies spirit of Big Data methods to art

5. Review
• Rationalization Effects
– What are we looking at?
– What is theory?
– What are models?
– What is culture?
– What are the humanities?

6. Overview
• Combined Studio and Lecture
• Lecture
– Google’s NGram Viewer
– Culturomics
• Studio:
– Collaborative Topic Index

7. Google Does the Humanities

8. Google NGrams
• Google Books comprises 11% of the corpus of
published books, about 2 trillion words
• NGrams uses 5.2 million books (4% of the
corpus)
• 500 billion words
• Published between 1500-1800
• In English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese
and Russian (Hebrew too)

9. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel

10. What’s an NGram?

11. A space-delimited string
N = number of strings
Case sensitive
Purely syntactic
Very hard to index

12. Culturomics
• A method more than a model (like Anderson
argues)
• Analogy is to genomics
– Does this make sense?
– What is the analog to the gene?

15. Parallel
Crossing
Convergent/Divergent

16. American
British

18. “There’s not even a historian of the book
connected to the project,” Mr. Menand
noted.

19. Anthony Grafton, History, Princeton

21. Studio
• We are now at the point where we have all the
pieces in place
– HTML markup, CSS, JavaScript
– Structured data (table in Google Docs)
– Visualization tools
• Create Character Index
– We will use everything we have done so far – notes,
network visualizations, etc.
– Today we begin to collaboratively create the Character
Index (a subset of a full topic index)