Culturomics is a form of
computational lexicology
Computational lexicology is a branch of computational linguistics, which is concerned with the use of computers in the study of lexicon. It has been more narrowly described by some scholars (Amsler, 1980) as the use of computers in the study of '' ...
that studies
human behavior
Human behavior is the potential and expressed capacity ( mentally, physically, and socially) of human individuals or groups to respond to internal and external stimuli throughout their life. Kagan, Jerome, Marc H. Bornstein, and Richard ...
and
cultural trends through the
quantitative analysis
Quantitative analysis may refer to:
* Quantitative research, application of mathematics and statistics in economics and marketing
* Quantitative analysis (chemistry), the determination of the absolute or relative abundance of one or more substanc ...
of digitized texts. Researchers
data mine large
digital archive
An archive is an accumulation of historical records or materials – in any medium – or the physical facility in which they are located.
Archives contain primary source documents that have accumulated over the course of an individual or ...
s to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American
neologism
A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
first described in a 2010 ''
Science (journal), Science'' article called ''Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books'', co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and
Erez Lieberman Aiden.
Michel and Aiden helped create the
Google Labs
Google Labs was an incubator created by Google to test and publicly demonstrate new projects. It was online from early 2002 to mid-2011.
Google described Google Labs as "a playground where our more adventurous users can play around with prototy ...
project
Google Ngram Viewer
The Google Ngram Viewer or Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in printed sources published between 1500 and 2019 in Google's text co ...
which uses