From The Chronicle of Higher Education
Erez Aiden Contains Multitudes
By Christopher Shea
Erez Lieberman Aiden, a biologist and computer scientist who has made important forays into the humanities, doesn't use language in quite the same way you or I do. He has just published a book, Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture (Riverhead), written with Jean-Baptiste Michel, whom he met when they were graduate students at Harvard....
You may be more familiar with the term "ngram," which Aiden and Michel helped to make semifamous in 2010, with the publication in Science of "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books." They and a dozen other authors showed how trends in word usage could be tracked over time, particularly from 1800 to 2000, by mining the data scanned by the Google Books project. At that point, the company says, it had scanned some 12 percent of documented books, or 15 million (the number has since grown). The ngrams database, which made use of about a third of the Google Books texts, offered a glimpse of "a new science," they wrote excitedly: "culturomics," a play on "genomics."...
Yet culturomics continues to be controversial. "The reason I don't trust these guys is that there's a crassness to the attitude that technologists, or 'scientistic' types, take to this material," says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches in the University of California at Berkeley's School of Information. "Pinker's a perfect example of this—the suggestion that we're not making progress in the humanities, that we need to put humanities on the same footing as the sciences, we need to create testable hypotheses."
In their eagerness to embrace the new tools, humanists are misusing them, Nunberg thinks....