Exploring Large Digital Bodies for the Study of Human Behavior

Abstract

Internet access has become a fundamental component of contemporary society, with major impacts in many areas that offer opportunities for new research insights. The search and deposition of information in digital media form large sets of data known as digital corpora , which can be used to generate structured data, representing repositories of knowledge and evidence of human culture. This information offers opportunities for scientific investigations that contribute to the understanding of human behavior on a large scale, reaching human populations/individuals that would normally be difficult to access. These tools can help access social and cultural varieties worldwide. In this article, we briefly review the potential of these corpora in the study of human behavior. Therefore, we propose Culturomics of Human Behavior as an approach to understand, explain, and predict human behavior using digital corpora .