image: Books are an important part of our cultural genome, the information that we pass on from generation to generation. "Culturomics" studies the evolution of human culture quantitatively, in this instance by using books as a 'fossil record' of previous generations. Top row: Authors have been writing books for millennia. Counting multiple editions, approximately 129 million distinct books have been published since the advent of the printing press (upper left). Second row: books stored in libraries and publishing houses are provided to Google for scanning (middle left). Over 15 million books have been scanned to date. Third row: each book is associated with metadata, such as author, publication date, and place of publication. 5 million of the 15 million digitized books were selected for computational analysis based on their language and the quality of their metadata (bottom left). Bottom row: a culturomic ‘timeline’ showing the frequency of the word ‘apple’ in English books over time (1800-2000). This image relates to an article that appeared in the Dec. 16, 2010, issue of Science Express, published by AAAS. The study, by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Michel at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., and colleagues was titled, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books." view more
Credit: Image courtesy of <i>Science</i>/AAAS