The other presentation I attended on day 1 of the festival was that given by Prof. David de Roure of the University of Oxford. He spoke on “Big Data for the Social Sciences“, which I hoped would be relevant to my own work on Learning Analytics. This blog post is my notes from his talk.
How does technology get used in research?
-> What is this new “big data” and what does it tell us?
- Big data does not respect disciplinary boundaries
- Data has been around a long time
- There is a lot of “hype” around big data that has led to inflated expectations of it
- Can consider 2013 as the year we sort to define big data and 2014 the year we begun to use it effectively
- It is big data because of both the velocity and volume of the data being generated
- “Data deluge” is now a phenomenon across the disciplines
- In the past analysis moved from the universities to business, now it is from the business world to the universities.
- There is huge unsatisfied demand for “data scientists”
- Mores Law vs The Big Social
- We use digital tools because it is the ecosystem – Research 2.0
- What is the relevance of Social Science to Big Data?
- We need to think through the implications
- RCUK’s definition of “big data” is: big enough that we can’t deal with it as we did before
- Why do we want it?
- To do things in new ways
- To do new things
- e.g. Twitter data – we can look at the evolution of social processes in real-time
- We need the expertise of those from classical Social Science
- e.g. food vs consumption
- can obtain new data from new sources (e.g. supermarket loyalty cards)
- We can use different data sets to correlate
- Real-time uses of big data, e.g. Twitter
- spread of infectious diseases
- riots
- Visualisation can lead to better analysis
- Underpinned by available infrastructure
- Wikipedia is an example of a social medium
- behaviorally it is socially constructed
- different in different countries/languages
— end —