Jean-Baptiste Michel is not known primarily as a traditional visual artist, but rather as a French data scientist, entrepreneur, and author, born in 1980. He is most recognized for his work in the field of quantitative analysis of culture using large digital data sets. Michel co-founded the cultural analytics project Google Ngram Viewer alongside Erez Lieberman Aiden. This tool allows users to graph the frequency of specific phrases or keywords in a corpus of books over a chosen period, revealing patterns in language and culture.
Michel's work often intersects with the humanities, through his approach to big data, which he applies to historical texts, languages, and human behavior. He has published several influential research papers and articles in the field of culturomics, a term he helped to popularize. Culturomics refers to the study of human culture and cultural trends through the quantitative analysis of digitized texts.
He graduated from École Polytechnique in France and earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University. At Harvard, he was a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and the faculty of the Department of Psychology. His work has been featured in prominent scientific journals, including Science and Nature, and he has delivered a TED talk on what we can learn from billions of words, showcasing his innovative approach to understanding human culture and history through the lens of data.
It is important to note that Jean-Baptiste Michel's contributions are not in creating traditional art but in developing new methodologies for understanding cultural phenomena and human behavior. His innovative use of technology and data science has opened up new avenues for research in the humanities, making his work influential across multiple disciplines.
As of my knowledge cutoff date in 2023, Jean-Baptiste Michel is alive and continues to contribute to his field. Since his body of work is ongoing and he is not a conventional artist, there may not be a conventional 'artistic legacy' associated with his name, but rather a significant impact on the way we analyze and interpret cultural data.