Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data (PDF).
In this article I address some of the theoretical and practical issues raised by emerging “big data”-driven social science and humanities. My observations are based on my own experience over last three years with big data projects carried out in my lab at UCSD and Calit2 (softwarestudies.com). The issues which we will discuss include the differences between “deep data” about a few and “surface data” about the many; getting access to transactional data; and the new “data analysis divide” between data experts and the rest of us.
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Reference:
Lev Manovich. "Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data."
Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold. The University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming 2012. PDF available at http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2011/04/new-article-by-lev-manovich-trending.html.