Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture

An Amazon Best Book of the Month, December 2013: How big is Big Data? As it turns out, unfathomably large. According to Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, the authors of Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, "If you wrote out the information contained in one megabyte by hand, the resulting line of 1s and 0s would be more than five times as tall as Mount Everest." A megabyte, though, is about one-fifth of an mp3. Written out, one terabyte, a common size for personal external hard drives, "would extend to Saturn and back twenty-five times." Still, Aiden and Michel understand how to look at data sets from a humanist perspective. They created the Google Ngram Viewer, the revolutionary tool that allows anyone to search for the frequency of words over man's written history (at least within the 30 million books Google has digitized since 2004). In Uncharted, they explore the history and implications of Big Data--its influence on business, government, and our personal lives. But perhaps the most remarkable part of Aiden and Michel's work is how they are able to turn the abstract language of Big Data into an accessible and thoughtful book. Who knew millions of lines of data could be so much fun? --Kevin Nguyen