TED Video: What We Learned from 5 Million Books

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This week we look at What we learned from 5 million books by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden. 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. In this video they show us how it works.

This is an interesting cultural tool. I used it to look up the word “freelancer” and some related words to see how far back in time they have been used. It’s a fairly modern word (mid-century) and still not as popular as the word “consultant.” Below is an Ngram with these words and others, to see the chart better follow this link to freelance Ngram word usage.

Freelance Word Usage Ngram