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GOOGLE鈥橲 鈥渇ossil record鈥� of digitised books now covers 5 million books, spans 500 years and more than 500 billion words. Already it is possible to trace the accelerating evolution of the English language, map the rise and fall of various people, and uncover patterns of censorship in Soviet Russia, modern China and 1950s America 鈥� and that鈥檚 only a beginning.
鈥淭his dataset is going to underwrite a field which is far, far more interesting than anything we could talk about in a single paper,鈥� says Erez Lieberman Aiden, who led the research at Harvard University with Jean-Baptiste Michel. From the more than 15 million books digitised to date, Aiden, Michel and colleagues from Google and Harvard selected the 5.2 million with the most reliable data, for example, they know the author and date. If written as a single line of text, this would stretch to the moon and back 10 times (Science, ).
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The researchers counted up the number of times each word appeared in the dataset during each year from 1800 to 2000, allowing them to follow changes in word use. Similarly, they tracked the mention of people鈥檚 names, a crude measure of fame, and found that people today become famous earlier in life than they used to 鈥� around the age of 29 in the mid-20th century, down from 43 in the early 19th century. However, fame today is more fleeting, they found.