Imagine how much information you could glean from reading every book ever published. Although that much reading would be impossible for any human, a group of researchers has already digitized 5,195,769 books (approximately four percent of all the books ever printed) and their computational analyses paint a rather vivid picture of how the world has been changing over hundreds of years. Jean-Baptiste Michel and colleagues refer to this experiment as “culturomics,” and they say their study can be used to inform fields as diverse as the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, the effects of censorship and historical epidemiology—just to name a few.

This particular group of researchers chose to focus on the English language between the years 1800 and 2000. They tracked how cultural changes, such as war and slavery, are linked with linguistic changes, or changes in the words we use to describe such c ultural changes. Michel and his colleagues analyzed more English words than any dictionary contains, identifying some words that have vanished from our vocabularies over time and other words that have slowly gained popularity. They tracked fame by measuring the frequency of a person’s name and determined that people nowadays are more famous than ever before, though they are also being forgotten more rapidly than ever.