Google boosts research in humanities by supporting "Digital
Humanities", a project aimed at analyzing vast literature made
available via Google Books. By now, the company has provided
over $1 million (€758,000) to 24 projects that develop software
exploring knowledge contained by Google's 15 million digitized
books.
Almost 12% of the literature that was published ever since
Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440 is made
available online. Project manager Jon Orwant says that: "almost
since computers were invented, people have envisioned using them to
expose the interconnections of the world's knowledge. That vision
is finally becoming real with the flowering of the web."
Digitization opens humanities to vast quantitative
research
"Digital Humanities" has now opened doors to conduct significant
quantitative research. This can complement more traditional
"insights through in-depth reading and painstaking analysis of
dozens or hundreds of texts".
Dan Cohan, historian at the U.S. George Mason University, for
instance analyzed how the role of religion changed in the Victorian
era of the 19th century. With the help of 1.7 million
books published between 1789 and 1914, Cohan described how the
words "religion" and "holy" started disappearing from book covers
of Victorian literature. Instead "sciences" were playing a much
greater role.