Erez Aiden

This book promotes an interesting program which Aiden and Michel helped to develop (the Google Ngram Viewer) and a term they invented (Culturomics - the use of huge amounts of digital information to track changes in language, culture and history), yet I feel they are only touching the surface with the technology they helped to create.

The Ngram Viewer and the use of Culturomics can be useful (software engineer Jeremy Ginsberg observed by researching googling records for a region that a flu epidemic can be quickly identified and can provide an early warning system for that region), yet the examples they give from their own research provide a reaffirmation of something we already know (the words unemployment and inflation are used more during economic depressions) or of something we could care little to know other than as an interesting tidbit ('doughnut' was overtaken by 'donut' soon after the business Dunkin' Donuts began). They state that "digital historical records are making it possible to quantify our human collective as never before" and that their culturomics is a "microscope to measure human culture"...yet the book lacks the deep thinking to reach a worthwhile goal, only interesting "potato chips for intellectuals" as stated in William Grimes NYT review ‘Uncharted,’ by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel. For now, it is mostly increasing awareness of trivial matters. But there is always the future to look forward to...and much more data.

Quote from page 10: 'As we experience all that contemporary life has to offer, as we live out more and more of our lives on the Internet, we've begun to leave an increasingly exhaustive trail of digital bread crumbs: a personal historical record of astonishing breadth and depth.'
How much of a trail?
page 11: One bit ( binary digit) is like one yes/no question where 1 is yes 0 is no. "...the average person's data footprint... is a little less than one terabyte' or 'about 8 trillion yes-or-no questions. 'Humanity produces five zettabytes each year : 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (forty sextillion) bits.'

That's why it's called big data. The total data footprint is doubling each year! Data records make it possible to reliably transform and manipulate information, so it is clear that this will be a territory that will probably remain mostly uncharted for a long time, or maybe just become a massive wasteland that only a few will care to bother visiting.

This book's concluding chapter focuses on similar future developments (life logging and mind-machine interfaces) that Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson covers in more depth and breadth. I would recommend simply checking out their TED talk What we learned from 5 million books ...its a brief account of what is covered in Uncharted, and that is really all the information that is needed . Read Clive Thompson's Smarter Than You Think to gain a deeper insight into the uncharted territory of technology. And read David Egger's The Circle for a fun and insightful fictional look into the future of life logging.… (mer)