Author(s) Name: Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Lieberman Aiden
This book discusses the power and problems inherent in attempts to measure aspects of human experience on an enormous scale. The book looks at how human culture has undergone subtle changes over time. As the authors suggest, the Big Data Revolution, which allows us to see things in new ways, can extend to the humanities, social science, and commerce.
Our society has gone from writing snippets of information by hand to generating a vast flood of 1s and 0s that record almost every aspect of our lives: who we know, what we do, where we go, what we buy, and who we love. This year, the world will generate 5 zettabytes of data.
What is emerging is a new way of understanding our world, our past, and possibly, our future. In Uncharted, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel tell the story of how they tapped into this sea of information to create a new kind of telescope: a tool that, instead of uncovering the motions of distant stars, charts trends in human history across the centuries. By teaming up with Google, they were able to analyze the text of millions of books.
All over the world, new scopes are popping up, using big data to quantify the human experience at the grandest scales possible. Yet dangers lurk in this ocean of 1s and 0s–threats to privacy and the specter of ubiquitous government surveillance.
ISBN: 9781594487453
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Year of Publication: 2013
Book Link: Home Page Url
