Ideas worth spreading

What we learned from 5 million books

2,155,728 views | Jean-Baptiste Michel + Erez Lieberman Aiden • TEDxBoston 2011

Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxBoston 2011, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

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About the speakers

Jean-Baptiste Michel

Jean-Baptiste Michel

Data researcher

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Jean-Baptiste Michel looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world.

Erez Lieberman Aiden

Erez Lieberman Aiden

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Erez Lieberman Aiden pursues a broad range of research interests, spanning genomics, linguistics, mathematics ...

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This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxBoston 2011, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Read more about TEDx.