All posts by Grace Costantino

On December 16, 2010 Science released a paper, “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” that describes data mining research using a vast textual archive created by the Google Books. The abstract reads, “We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of “culturomics”, focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. ‘Culturomics’ extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.”

This week, we featured one of our BHL users, Dr. Torsten Dikow, in our regular blog series, BHL and our Users. With a focus on flies in his research, Dr. Dikow identified his favorite book in BHL, which we’re highlighting today as our book of the week.

Meet Torsten Dikow, a postdoc based in the BHL partner institution, the Field Museum, who not only uses BHL heavily for his own research on flies, but also works to help BHL acquire the rights to digitize in-copyright publications by encouraging smaller natural history museums and scientific societies to grant digitization permissions to BHL. We are so very thankful for his support and advocacy on our behalf!

In our last post, our featured user Mathew Louis named The Ibis as his favorite title in BHL. Thus, we decided to feature this entire series as our “book of the week” this week. Not only is The Ibis full of valuable information on birds, it’s also loaded with beautiful illustrations, many of which are featured in Mathew Louis’ website.

This week we feature one of our users that has taken a particular interest in BHL for the purpose of images, using BHL to strengthen the collection of scientific illustrations found on his website. As our users have long shown a specific interest in the images associated with BHL content, we expect that this post, and the work of our featured user, Mathew Louis, will prove to be particularly interesting to our user community.

This week we decided to put the power of choosing the book of the week in the hands of our users. So, using the “Questions” app on our Facebook Page, we asked you which book out of the four options given you would like to see featured on our blog. The options were The Snakes of Australia, British Dragonflies, La Galerie des Oiseaux, and A Book of Whales. The winner?

The Snakes of Australia (1869), by Gerard Krefft!

As the planet warms, habitats for a myriad of species worldwide are changing, and perhaps those most affected are the species living in the arctic regions of the globe. These areas are seeing significant increases in average temperatures, changing the dynamics for the life found there.