Shapiro couldn’t find anything as crisp and definitive as he had done for me years earlier when I asked him to try to find the first reference to the word “software” as a computing term. He scoured data bases and came up with several references, including in press releases for product announcementsĪnd one intriguing use of the term by a now-famous author (more on that later).īut Mr. To our modest tale of word sleuthing: Last August, I wrote a Sunday column aboutĢ012 being the breakout year for Big Data as an idea, in the marketplace, and as a term.Īt the time, I did some reporting on the roots of the term, and I asked Mr. The unruly digital data of the Web is a big ingredient in what is now being called “Big Data.” And as it turns out, the term Big Data seems to be most accurately traced not to references in news or journalĪrchives, but to digital artifacts now posted on technical Web sites, appropriately enough. Shapiro, editor of the “Yale Book of Quotations” and an associate librarian at the Yale Law School. “It’s almost like oral language instead of edited text,” said Fred R. The new digital forms of communication - Web sites, blog posts, tweets - are often very different from the traditional sources for the study of words, like books, news articles and academic journals. In a white paper, the Library said that social media promises to be a rich resource that provides “a fuller picture of today’s cultural norms, dialogue, trendsĪnd events to inform scholarship, the legislative process, new works of authorship, education and other purposes.” The Library of Congress archive, resulting from a deal struck with Twitter in 2010, is not yet open to researchers.
Just last month, for example, the Library of Congress said its archive of public Twitter messages has reachedġ70 billion tweets and rising, by about 500 million tweets a day. Merely an academic pursuit but a window into a society’s intellectual evolution.ĭigital technology is changing both how words and ideas are created and proliferate, and how they are studied. And words are how we express ideas, so tracing their origin, development and spread is not Words and phrases are fundamental building blocks of language and culture, much as genes and cells are to the biology of life.