As electricity, cars, airplanes and computers

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“The Internet Archive has always been very good about preservation,” says Alexopoulos. She reached out to the Internet Archive for assistance in digitizing older Dewey Decimal classification documents and unlocking useful materials from the Library of Congress. The scanning center at the University of Toronto digitized some of the books for the project. “The Internet Archive makes content searchable and that helps facilitate the kind of research we are doing,” she says.

With the historical documents scanned, Alexopoulos was able to do data mining and text analysis to compare new categories and subentries librarians created over time when they identified a new technology emerging. A were invented, new published lists of terms were adopted to classify those topics in the books and materials that were being added to public and academic libraries.

“We are trying to capture when new technologies are europe cell phone number list coming to market and when they’re recognized as something significantly different than what we had before to get an idea of what is major and what is more minor in terms of impact,” Alexopoulos says.

The goal is to be able to recognize future trends in real time to predict which industries will be affected by the next big innovation. Economists love to blame technical change for all sorts of things, Alexopoulos says. For instance, there is debate now about whether artificial intelligence is going to “destroy us all” or whether it will lead to productivity growth, she says.

“Changes in technology can be linked to business cycles and they are really important for getting long-run economic growth,” Alexopoulos says. “The problem is our models rely on technical change, but it’s very difficult to measure it.”