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GOOGLE’S “fossil record” of digitised books now covers 5 million books, spans 500 years and more than 500 billion words. Already it is possible to trace the accelerating evolution of the English language, map the rise and fall of various people, and uncover patterns of censorship in Soviet Russia, modern China and 1950s America – and that’s only a beginning.
“This dataset is going to underwrite a field which is far, far more interesting than anything we could talk about in a single paper,” says Erez Lieberman Aiden, who led the research at Harvard…
