Leveraging the Google Books corpus, Google has released the Google N Gram viewer. There is coverage all over the web … but here is just few articles: (NY Times) (Mother Jones) (Scientific American) (Boston.com). It is also possible to download the underlying data. For additional information, click here to access the about page. Very cool stuff!
While Google Ngrams is a fun exploratory tool, it is merely a glimpse at the real possibilities in the era of Big Data. Two major conferences this year — Princeton CITP: Big Data Conference and ECCS 2010: High Throughput Humanities offered a preview of the world that is coming. In my presentation at these conferences, I tried to underscore the ways in which these developments are meaningful for social scientists, legal scholars and practicing lawyers. In short, the prospects for arbitrage here are significant. It will be exciting to watch creative folks try to put things together …