= Culturomics
<Culturomics> investigates historical patterns through large-scale quantitative analysis of recorded <language>, especially digitized books. A <text corpus> turns occurrences of words or <n-grams> into measurable <time series>. <Jean-Baptiste Michel> and collaborators demonstrated the approach with a corpus of 5,195,769 books, selecting material partly by the quality of <optical character recognition> and publication metadata.<Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books by Jean-Baptiste Michel and others>[Introduction and Fig. 1A, corpus construction; usage-frequency definition]{ref}
For an original example, 500 occurrences in ten million word tokens give $500/10^7=5\times10^{-5}$. A later collection with 800 occurrences in twenty million tokens gives $4\times10^{-5}$: the count rose, but the normalized rate fell. A changing name can also change the measured series without an equivalent change in its referent. <Culturomics> therefore connects computational counting to hypotheses about <language change>, while requiring checks on publication selection, transcription errors and changing terminology.
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