What We Learned From 5 Million Books

Google Labs' Ngram Viewer is an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

Jean-Baptiste Michel is a data researcher who looks at how we can use large volumes of data to better understand our world.

Erez Lieberman Aiden is a researcher who pursues a broad range of research interests, spanning genomics, linguistics, mathematics, etc.