culturomics

English

Etymology

From culture +‎ -omics (“study of the totality”); first described in a 2010 Science article by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.

Noun

culturomics (uncountable)

1. A form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts.
   • 2013 December 24, William Grimes, “Big Data Becomes a Mirror”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     The momentous term culturomics suggests the authors’ ambitious view of what can seem like an intellectual parlor game. The magazine Mother Jones, they cheerfully admit, called the Ngram Viewer “possibly the greatest time-waster in the history of the Internet.” But the authors argue that just as Galileo’s telescope opened new, previously unimagined worlds, the powerful lens of culturomics “is going to change the humanities, transform the social sciences and renegotiate the relationship between the world of commerce and the ivory tower.”

2. (biology) The study of culturomes

Further reading

• culturomics on Wikipedia.Wikipedia