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The Upright Thinkers by Leonard Mlodinow A book for science lovers and for anyone interested in creative thinking and in our ongoing quest to understand our world. Learn more | See similar books
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I was lucky enough to read Aiden & Michel's original study, "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books," when it appeared in Science on 14 January 2011. It was an astonishing piece of scholarship, one of the rare papers that divides an entire branch of human learning into "before" and "after." I felt the hair on the back of my neck rise as I read it. In essence, they mined through the Google Books database to answer concrete questions about linguistics, culture, politics, even topics such as the nature of fame and the pace of propagation of new technologies. It was a tour de force.
The title of this book, "Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture," suggests that it will be a general text on Big Data, but it is not. It covers only this body of work by these two researchers and their assistants.
The book repeats the contents of that 2011 article, explaining the results for the general public, adding some discussion of the origins of the work and the researchers' thoughts about the future. In the process, they expand the original piece, which was about six pages long excluding notes, to about 220 pages. Some of the new material is fun; I got a kick out the story about a romance novel that had been alphabetized and the information that could still be gleaned from it. Others seem like padding; who cares about this history of lexical concordances?
It's a shame that Aiden & Michel wrote this book themselves; the same material coming from a third party would not have seemed so self-congratualtory and, sometimes, smug.Read more ›
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, is a fun look at a pretty amazing research project. Starting as graduate students, authors Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel wanted to use big data to answer interesting questions. What started out as a simple research question ended up jump starting the authors' careers and an entirely new way to look at big data.
They came up with an idea to make a tool that could query Google's digitized library in order to determine word frequencies. Using the tool they invented, called the Google Ngram Viewer, they have been able to answer interesting questions that relate to word frequencies, explore how language changes over time, assess the adoption of new technology, assess fame, and conjecture as to how the answers to the questions they pose reflect on the prevailing culture.
Although the idea is simple in concept, it wasn't so simple in execution. They had to wiggle their way into the Googleverse to get permission to use the database, write a lot of code, and iron out certain legal/copyright problems. But once all this was done, the magic began.
I won't go into detail about their findings, but suffice it to say, they not only created the Ngram Viewer but used it intelligently to come to some very interesting (and often humorous) conclusions. Their analogy of Ngram Viewer as a modern equivalent of Galileo's telescope is an apt one. Without the telescope, Galileo couldn't have made some of his most important astronomic observations. Without the Ngram Viewer, it would be much impossible to look at; things like the transformation of irregular verbs over time or get a good idea when writers really started to refer to The United States in the singular (the results are surprising).Read more ›
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11 of 16 people found the following review helpful
This is probably not a book you are going to like.
Uncharted is a book that focuses on the evolution and structure of written language as it can be discovered through large scale data analysis. The authors seem to have done their graduate work in this area. As specialists they find the topic fascinating. However, most people are not going to be nearly as enchanted. Reading this book is a bit like reading an account by someone who is fascinated by baseball statistics.
Malcolm Gladwell is probably the most popular reporter of data that illuminates things that we assume are true but turn out not to be. For example, Gladwell reported on some research that shows that rank in a group has a strong influence on individual success. The surprising conclusion is that if you're admitted to an elite institution, like Harvard, where you will be in the middle of the pack you should turn it down and accept a more middle rank placement where you can be at the top. This flies in the face of our assumptions and biases which is what makes Gladwell interesting. Also, Gladwell is an accomplished writer who has published in the New Yorker and written several best selling books.
Unfortunately the authors of Uncharted are not Malcolm Gladwell. The conclusions that their data analysis reveals is mainly about written language evolution and structure. While this could be an interesting topic, it is not in the hands of these authors (I suppose that it could be observed that they are not Umberto Eco either).
The book attempts a popular tone and the plots all look as if they were hand drawn (although I suspect that they were, in fact, computer generated).Read more ›
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