How big really is “big data” - the huge amounts of information that have been talked about so much lately? Here is a clear example: if you write down in a line all the numbers 0 and 1, which make up one terabyte of information (quite a normal capacity for a modern hard drive), then the chain of numbers will be 50 times longer than the distance from Earth to Saturn! And yet, “big data” can be viewed in human terms. Eretz Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, linguists and computer geniuses who created the Google Ngram Viewer and the term “culturalomics,” show how big data analysis can help explore difficult issues in language, culture, and history.