Google is awarding $1 million in funding to academic institutions to undertake research on the 12 million books it has digitized as part of its Google Books project.

The research is interesting because it will use quantitative techniques rather than critical, allowing academics to pull out language trends and plot books by geographic and topical themes.

With 12 million titles in 400 languages dating back hundreds of years, Google Books effectively destroys the notion of the canon. So while previous surveys of Victorial literature will draw heavily on the works of Charles Dickens and George Eliot, the research being funded by Google is based on every book written during the era.

One of the projects, Google Ancient Places, is going to make a the Google Books database searchable by geographic location and time period, with the service available to anyone. It will also plot results on Google Maps or Google Earth. Another project will make different translations of works available for comparison.

The project is part of Google’s mission to make the sum of human knowledge available. It will be interesting to see if it goes any way to dispelling some of the opposition to Google Books.

So far, 12 research projects have been funded at 15 universities – the full list is on the Google Blog.

Jon Orwant, engineering manager for Google Books, says: “We look forward to working with them, and hope that over time the field of digital humanities will fulfill its promise of transforming the ways in which we understand human culture.”