The momentous term culturomics suggests the authors’ ambitious view of what can seem like an intellectual parlor game. The magazine Mother Jones, they cheerfully admit, called the Ngram Viewer “possibly the greatest time-waster in the history of the Internet.” But the authors argue that just as Galileo’s telescope opened new, previously unimagined worlds, the powerful lens of culturomics “is going to change the humanities, transform the social sciences and renegotiate the relationship between the world of commerce and the ivory tower.”
Source: wiktionary