Big Data and Human Culture
February 1, 2014
A couple of big data pros have written the book on how data analysis can connect us with our culture’s evolution. At least one critic, though, is lukewarm about the project, for which the authors plumbed the depths of Google’s huge digitized book database for patterns in word usage. Nick Romeo at the Daily Beast describes “Why Big Data Doesn’t Live up to the Hype.”
He writes:
“Sometimes it seems the only thing larger than big data is the hype that surrounds it. Within the first 30 pages of Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel manage to compare themselves to Galileo and Darwin and suggest that they, too, are revolutionizing the world. The authors were instrumental in creating the Google Ngram viewer, which allows researchers or anyone else so inclined to explore the changing frequencies of words across time. Likening their creation to a cultural telescope, they proceed to share some of their ostensibly dazzling findings.”
Romeo begins his piece with an account of similar, pre-big-data-era investigations into language that is worth checking out in itself. He admits that it can be interesting to observe the patterns that turn up in such explorations, both analog and digital. He even shares a few examples from the book that he found intriguing. For example, writers shifted from treating “the United States” as plural to singular in 1880. However, Romeo maintains that Aiden and Michel are overstating the significance of their finds, which he calls mere trivia. Is he right, or could such efforts provide key insights into the human condition?
Cynthia Murrell, February 01, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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One Response to “Big Data and Human Culture”
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Almost nothing lives up to it’s hype, almost by definition… “extravagant or intensive publicity or promotion… often exaggerating its importance or benefits”
that being said, there are truths that drive hype. In this case, I think there are strong arguments to be made that the ideas of large scale data analysis including the tools (and processes) produced under the “big data umbrella” are enabling new avenues of scientific exploration, just as the microscope, telescope, magnetic spectrometer, etc did for other physical sciences.
data are recorded fingerprints (representation) of real world events (leave fiction and art out of this). certainly tools that allows us to analyze, reason about, prove/disprove theories or create new hypotheses from these fingerprints are indeed important, if not fundamentally game changing.
I’m sure we could find numerous critics that postulated “telescopes won’t change the world”, if only those old books were digitized and we had the horsepower/algorithms to run effective sentiment analysis…
take the hype for what it is (marketing), take the critics for what they are (marketers) but large scale data analysis is a game changer, now if we just had the tools to catalog, categorize and find all the answers it was producing