SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY
Culturomics: Word Play
from Nature
Erez Lieberman Aiden is standing on the sun deck of his town house, rocking back and forth on the balls of his bare feet as he belts out a blessing. The Hebrew words echo across the quiet courtyards of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The sky has turned indigo as the light and warmth leak away from this day in late April. Shalom aleichem, he sings. Peace be upon you.
Lieberman Aiden--molecular biologist, applied mathematician and, at 31 years old, the precocious doyen of the emerging field known as the digital humanities--could do with a little peace. The cries of his 10-month-old son have abated--for the moment--and he has had just enough time to throw on a pair of frayed black trousers and a shiny synthetic pullover before his guests arrive. A five o'clock shadow darkens the terrain between his thick goatee and unkempt hair.
The night before, he caught a late train back from Princeton University in New Jersey, where he, the geeky scientist, had the delicate task of informing a room of erudite historians that his efforts at mining a database of 5 million books, about 4% of all those ever published, had made much of what they do trivially easy. The scrupulous tracking of ideas across history, for instance--work that has consumed entire careers--can be done in seconds with tools that Lieberman Aiden and his colleagues have invented.
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