Primeros reseñadoresJean-Baptiste Michel

One of the greatest untapped resources of today isn’t offshore oil or natural gas – it’s data. Gigabytes, exabytes (that’s one quintillian bytes) of data sets are sitting on servers across the world, holding vast amounts of potential information for potential analysis. The question is, how can we start to access this explosion of “big data,” how can we make it useful to us and ultimately, what can it tell us? Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel are two young scientists at Harvard who started to ask those questions. They teamed up with Google to create the Ngram Viewer, a web-based tool that can chart words throughout the huge Google Books archive, sifting through millions of books and billions of words to find word frequencies that translate into fascinating cultural analysis. Erez and JB realized that this tool had huge implications for looking at our shared human history and written record in a scientific way. On the day that the Ngram viewer debuted in 2010, over one million queries were run through it. This tool has enabled researchers to "measure" aspects of our history and human experience, to track how our language has evolved over time, how art has been censored, how fame can grow and fade, how nations trend towards war. How we remember and how we forget. This book documents a new, exhilarating way to look at big datasets and the data of human experience, and draw out fascinating new perspectives on our language, cultural trends, and history. It also uses those topics as frameworks to refine the tools that we need to finally access and understand these massive datasets that come from Google Books, Facebook, Twitter, and the exponentially growing digital footprints of every day life. Because having the data is one thing but being able to use it to gain new perspectives is the next challenge. Colored with fascinating anecdotes, real world examples, and illustrated with informative and surprising graphs, Uncharted reveals Erez and JB’s own fascinating cutting-edge research utilizing the Ngram Viewer in diverse fields – from history to literature, from the world of finance to linguistics, from memory to fame. Erez and JB have pioneered this approach to looking at our collective past through the lens of “big data,” developing the tools and asking the questions that are just beginning to make an enormous impact on how our lives and our world have grown and changed.