Uncharted by Erez Aiden & Jean-Baptiste Michel

7.5 out of 10

With the help of Google, two academics acquired the word frequencies from millions of books spanning multiple centuries. They discussed the current state of "Big Data" and speculated about the future. They answered questions like, "Is the English language growing?" or "At what rates are irregular verbs regularized?". They gleaned insights on fame, censorship and collective memory. And they peppered the book with charts. I implore everyone to try their tool (books.google.com/ngrams).