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Culturomics: Unlocking Culture with Raw Data, Town Hall Seattle, Jan. 24
January 24, 2014 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Culturomics: Unlocking Culture with Raw Data, Town Hall Seattle
When: Friday, January 24, 2014, 7:30pm – 9:00pm
Where: Downstairs at Town Hall; Enter on Seneca Street
What: Which is more popular, tea or coffee? In the city of Starbucks, the answer might seem obvious. What if we asked the same question, but through the lens of data? The Google Ngram Viewer can tell us. A simple search shows that while tea has historically been wildly popular, coffee replaced it as the dominant drink in the mid-1960s. In Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, authors Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel chronicle their research of Google’s 15 million digitized books, which led to the creation of the Ngram Viewer. This tool is, as they suggest, “a lens on human culture.” Aiden, a Harvard Fellow and Visiting Faculty at Google, will show us that in our increasingly technological world, it only makes sense to track our history by crunching the numbers. With their help, we can learn the methods of culturomics and utilize raw data to analyze history, cultural trends, technology and possibly predict the future.
Who: About the authors.
How Much: $5
How: More information here.
