Culturomics

[3] 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.

In a study called Culturomics 2.0, Kalev H. Leetaru examined news archives including print and broadcast media (television and radio transcripts) for words that imparted tone or "mood" as well as geographic data.

[17] In a 2014 study by T Lansdall-Welfare and co-authors, 5 million news articles were collected over 5 years[18] and then analyzed to suggest a significant shift in sentiment relative to coverage of nuclear power, corresponding with the disaster of Fukushima.

In 2015, a study revealed the bias of the Google books data set, which "suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity,"[5] and calls into question the significance of many of the earlier results.

Mass media misinterpreted this as "myth busted: rain does not increase joint pain",[22][23] while the authors speculate the observed correlation is due to "changes in physical activity levels".

[24] Linguists and lexicographers have expressed skepticism regarding the methods and results of some of these studies, including one by Petersen et al.[25] Others have demonstrated bias in the Ngram data set.