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What Can Google Do For Old Books?
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"Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost."
The opening lines to Dante's "Inferno," once only available in your favorite, tattered copy, are already accessible on your computer.
What new work can we do with old books? As Google Books works to digitize every book in the universe, researchers in Boston are tapping Google's vast index and search tools to perform more in-depth study of literature and language, from tracking irregular verbs in the English language to finding trends in classic Greek and Roman texts.
Guests:
- Jon Orwant, engineering manager for Google Books
- Professor Gregory Crane, professor and chairman of the Department of Classics at Tufts University; adjunct professor of computer science; winner of one of the Google Humanities Research Awards grants
This program aired on July 20, 2010.