On December 16th, 2010, a team spanning the Cultural Observatory, Harvard, Encyclopaedia Britannica, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Google published a paper describing the Culturomics approach online in the journal Science, and at the same time launched the world's first real-time culturomic browser on Google Labs.

The tool contains a collection of words from over five million books and can readily show their frequency and usage. This type of quantitative studies can be called "culturomics".

Culturomics is promoted by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Michel and his Harvard colleague, Erez Lieberman Aiden. Jean-Baptiste Michel is an engineer from Ecole Polytechnique (Paris), and holds an MS in Applied Mathematics plus a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.  Erez Lieberman Aiden's research interests spans a broad range of areas, including genomics, linguistics and mathematics.

Together they are Founding Directors of Harvard's Cultural Observatory, where their research team studies human culture, language and history.

One result is the Google Books NGram Viewer. From a simple search result that results in a simple graph, a person can see when in time a word or phrase (for example "superstar" became popular and how that popularity has increased or waned over the years.

Related links:

http://www.culturomics.org

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com