12. Big Data, Big Stories

In the past 30 years, the world has become ever more computerized. Advancements in technology and the dropping costs of digital storage meant that corporations, governments, and academics alike started to collect and record information on an unprecedented scale. The rate at which new information is stored is growing to such an extent that today, 90 % of all the worlds’ data have been created in the last 2 years (IBM Big Data, December 28, 2013: http://​www-01.​ibm.​com/​software/​data/​bigdata). Contained within these ever-expanding data structures are the stories of our time. As an increasing share of cultural exchange becomes “born digital,” the question becomes how to represent all this information. While managing and reading Big Data requires technical skills, finding the narrative in the database is as much about digital culture as it is about technology. Can data design extract the big stories from Big Data? I will explore this question using a case study from my own practice: The Deleted City, A Digital Archeology. I will discuss how data technology invented and distributed by the software industry can, in the hands of designers and creative coders, amount to a data culture.