Analyzing Culture With Google Books

Harperdog writes with this excerpt from Miller-McCune: "I would not call myself a Luddite — I use digital resources all the time, in my research and my teaching. I have hundreds of PDFs of books I have downloaded from a variety of online sources — Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Gallica (the digital service of the French National Library), and yes, Google Books — that I use in my research. But when I read the Science article (abstract), I was immediately struck by what seems to me to be a fundamental flaw in its methodology: its reliance on Google Books for its sample. Google Books has focused on digitizing academic libraries. I would argue that books found in academic libraries are not necessarily representative of cultural trends across society. As any historian knows, every scholarly library is different and every library has its biases.'"