What can 500 billion words tell us?

Big Data and Learning Analytics are ‘big’ things at the moment – lots of chatter and papers and articles are coming out on it. The Horizon report has had it on it’s list for a couple of years now.

But what about using data from 15 million digitised books to investigate trends in grammar, perspectives, ideas, passions, people, etc.? If you like data, you’ll like this.

Now, think about this approach and using it on student data, engagement rates, assessments, learning materials, attendance, activities, etc.? See where this is (could be) going?

Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words (TEDx Boston – What we learned from 5million books).