"[Uncharted] tells the story of how Aiden and Michel built . . . an addictive online tool called the Google Ngram Viewer.
Based on the belief that 'the books of a particular time and place are among the most important sources of information about that time and that place,' the Ngram Viewer instantly reads the texts of about 6 percent of all books ever published (yes, you read that correctly) to produce line graphs charting the frequency of certain words over a certain period of time.
'Very cool,' you say. 'But so what?' Erez and Michel, who call their work 'culturomics' are still, to a degree, working that out. 'This is the frontier of science,' they write. 'There is no map, lots of guesswork, and plenty of blind alleys, but there's no place better.' What is clear, however, is the Ngram Viewer's staggering potential to reveal hidden parts of our world."
—John Wilwol, San Francisco Chronicle
