Culturomics study mentions Nazi-supporter subpopulation but lacks concrete allegations

extreme, 1.5% of the population exhibited a dramatic rise (s>5). This subpopulation is highly enriched for Nazis and Nazi-supporters, who benefited immensely from government propaganda (7). These results provide a strategy for rapidly identifying likely victims of censorship from a large pool of possibilities, and highlights how culturomic methods might complement existing historical approaches. Culturomics Culturomics is the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Books are a beginning, but we must also incorporate newspapers (29), manuscripts (30), maps (3/), artwork (32), and a myriad of other human creations (33, 34). Of course, many voices — already lost to time — lie forever beyond our reach. Culturomic results are a new type of evidence in the humanities. As with fossils of ancient creatures, the challenge of culturomics lies in the interpretation of this evidence. Considerations of space restrict us to the briefest of surveys: a handful of trajectories and our initial interpretations. Many more fossils, with shapes no less intriguing, beckon: (i) Peaks in “influenza” correspond with dates of known pandemics, suggesting the value of culturomic methods for historical epidemiology (35) (Fig. 5A). (ii) Trajectories for “the North”, “the South”, and finally, “the enemy” reflect how polarization of the states preceded the descent ito war (Fig. 5B). (ii) In the battle of the sexes, the “women” are gaining ground on the “men” (Fig. 5C). (iv) “féminisme” made early inroads in France, but the US proved to be a more fertile environment in the long run (Fig. 5D). (v) “Galileo”, “Darwin”, and “Einstein” may be well-known scientists, but “Freud” is more deeply engrained in our collective subconscious (Fig. 5E). (v1) Interest in “evolution” was waning when “DNA” came along (Fig. 5F). (vii) The history of the American diet offers many appetizing opportunities for future research; the menu includes “steak”, “sausage”, “ice cream’, “hamburger”, “pizza”, “pasta”, and “sushi” (Fig. 5G). (viil) “God” is not dead; but needs a new publicist (Fig. 5H). These, together with the billions of other trajectories that accompany them, will furnish a great cache of bones from which to reconstruct the skeleton of a new science. References and Notes 1. Wilson, Edward O. Consilience. New York: Knopf, 1998. 2. Sperber, Dan. "Anthropology and psychology: Towards an epidemiology of representations." Man 20 (1985): 73-89. Ww . Lieberson, Stanley and Joel Horwich. "Implication analysis: a pragmatic proposal for linking theory and data in the social sciences." Sociological Methodology 38 (December 2008): 1-50. . Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., and Marcus W. Feldman. Cultural Transmission and Evolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1981. . Niyogi, Partha. The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2006. . Zipf, George Kingsley. The Psycho-biology of Language. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935. . Materials and methods are available as supporting material as Nn an ~ on Science Online. oo . Lander, E. S. et al. "Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome." Nature 409 (February 2001): 860-921. . Read, Allen W. “The Scope of the American Dictionary.” American Speech 8 (1933): 10-20. 10. Gove, Philip Babcock, ed. Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 1993. 11. Pickett, Joseph, P. ed. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Boston / New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Pub., 2000. \o 12. Simpson, J. A., E. S. C. Weiner, and Michael Proffitt, eds. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford [England]: Clarendon, 1993. 13. Algeo, John, and Adele S. Algeo. Fifty Years among the New Words: a Dictionary of Neologisms, 1941-1991. Cambridge UK, 1991. 14. Pinker, Steven. Words and Rules. New York: Basic, 1999, 15. Kroch, Anthony S. "Reflexes of Grammar in Patterns of Language Change." Language Variation and Change 1.03 (1989): 199. 16. Bybee, Joan L. "From Usage to Grammar: The Mind's Response to Repetition." Language 82.4 (2006): 711-33. 17. Lieberman*, Erez, Jean-Baptiste Michel*, Joe Jackson, Tina Tang, and Martin A. Nowak. "Quantifying the Evolutionary Dynamics of Language." Nature 449 (2007): 713-16. 18. Milner, Brenda, Larry R. Squire, and Eric R. Kandel. "Cognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory."Neuron 20.3 (1998): 445-68. 19. Ebbinghaus, Hermann. Memory: a Contribution to Experimental Psychology. New York: Dover, 1987. 20. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Trans. Lewis A. Coser. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1992. 21. Ulam, S. "John Von Neumann 1903-1957." Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society 64.3 (1958): 1-50. 22. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame & Its History. New York: Vintage, 1997. Sciencexpress / www.sciencexpress.org / 16 December 2010 / Page 5 / 10.1126/science.1199644 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017000 Downloaded from www.sciencemag.org on December 16, 2010