What is "culturomics"

n. A form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts.

Culturomics is a form of computational lexicology that studies human behavior and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts. Researchers data mine large digital archives to investigate cultural phenomena reflected in language and word usage. The term is an American neologism first described in a 2010 Science article called Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, co-authored by Harvard researchers Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Lieberman Aiden.

Michel and Aiden helped create the Google Labs project Google Ngram Viewer which uses n-grams to analyze the Google Books digital library for cultural patterns in language use over time.