Not all data (or knowledge) is inherently computable. But as humanity has marched on, we have invented ways to capture knowledge as data that can be searched, compared, analyzed, crunched, cubed, and everything in between. In fact, one could say that over the past few years we have moved from just an “information age” to a “compute age.”
Wolfram Alpha has published a timeline of humanity’s progress towards this “compute age.” This interactive application is a really cool way to appreciate how, as a society, we have adopted a position of digitizing everything and then applying computational frameworks to enable the transformation of that digitized information into “knowledge.”
http://www.wolframalpha.com/docs/timeline/
Image courtesy of blog.wolframalpha.com.
Originally posted 2011-09-10 09:33:55.