Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World

  • Christine L. Borgman
MIT Press: 2015. 9780262028561 | ISBN: 978-0-2620-2856-1

Data-ism: The Revolution Transforming Decision Making, Consumer Behavior and Almost Everything Else

  • Steve Lohr
Harper Business: 2015. 9780062226815 9781780745183 | ISBN: 978-0-0622-2681-5

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World

  • Bruce Schneier
W. W. Norton: 2015. 9780393244816 | ISBN: 978-0-3932-4481-6

The term has been around for almost two decades, but the world only really started talking about 'big data' in the first few months of 2011. We know this because we can look it up on Google Trends (see 'Byte marks').

Byte marks: The surge of interest in big data since 2011 can be clearly traced in Google's archive of search terms. Credit: Source: Google Trends; Graphic: Claire Welsh/Nature

Google built its empire on gathering and analysing nearly unfathomable depths of data. Every query ever typed into the search engine is sitting in Google's multi-exabyte data stores. These stores also hold the full text of tens of millions of books, high-resolution images of streets around the world and myriad e-mails, videos, word-processing documents and spreadsheets. Anything that can be rendered in bits and bytes and is accessible to the company's servers will be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed and numbered by semi-autonomous information-gathering agents. Enter 'big data' into the Google Trends website and, a fraction of a second later, a graph of frequency appears, its line rising sharply upwards in the first quarter of 2011. You are distilling that information from a colossal data set containing the entire world's search-engine queries for the past ten years.

Seamless upgrades in computer interfaces masked a liminal moment: in a few years, we have moved from data that can be created, gathered and understood by unaided humans — kilobytes, megabytes and gigabytes — into the hitherto unimaginable realm of petabytes and exabytes, gathered at terahertz speeds and processed almost as quickly. The transition has moved beyond scale to revolution.

In Big Data, Little Data, No Data, information-studies specialist Christine Borgman looks at big data through a fairly narrow lens: academic research. Each day, scientists grapple with ever more appalling volumes of data. The ATLAS detector on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, has to sort through dozens of terabytes of data every second while it is running — and filter that down by five orders of magnitude before humans can deal with it. Next-generation telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array will be gathering exabytes of data each day — an amount that would have filled the total storage capacity of all the world's information-carrying devices (including books, photos and videos) up to the mid-1980s.

Borgman is something of a data anthropologist. She goes among researchers in physical sciences, social sciences and humanities alike to find out how they collect, handle and share the flood of information. Her treatise is interesting, but frustrating. She has difficulty turning her sizeable data set into a narrative both broad enough to cover the range of topics and deep enough to do justice to them. All too often, she seems to give a quick nod to essential elements. For example, she mentions open publications and data, but provides no hint of the battles around them in the research and publishing worlds. She offers key insights — that there are different dynamics to publishing research results and raw data, and that it is shortsighted to focus on releasing new data sets rather than on how to preserve and reuse the data. But the book might have said much more. There is nary a word about the huge controversy around incursions of commercial entities into the gathering, dissemination and control of scholarly data.

In Data-ism, Steve Lohr goes after the commercial implications of big data, but through an equally narrow lens. As a veteran technology and business reporter, he is attracted to the story of how data can help to root out inefficiencies that stop businesses reaching their potential. He gives the example of McKesson, a drug and medical-supply distributor that used its archives of product and shipping data to create a supply-chain model. That led to a billion-dollar decrease in inventories and a sizeable jump in efficiency, showing, as Lohr says, “data really being used to ... make better decisions, ones that trump best guesses and gut feel, experience and intuition”.

Alas, Data-ism is very much a conventional business book, full of anecdotes, mini-profiles and aphorisms that grow ever less compelling, however well they would go over at a TEDx talk. Lohr's journalistic instincts often seem to betray him. He is unimpressed with the massive data-collecting and consumer-profiling of information giant Acxiom, yet bowled over by a seemingly conventional personality-horoscope program that snaffled up Twitter feeds, and, for 81% of subjects, “pretty much matched the results of their formal tests for personality type, basic values, and needs”.

Neither Borgman nor Lohr truly grapples with the immensity of the big-data story. At its core, big data is not primarily a business or research revolution, but a social one. In the past decade, we have allowed machines to act as intermediaries in almost every aspect of our existence. When we communicate with friends, entertain ourselves, drive, exercise, go to the doctor, read a book — a computer transmitting data is there. We leave behind a vast cloud of bits and bytes.

Bruce Schneier, a security analyst known for designing the Blowfish block-cipher algorithm — a fast and flexible method of encrypting data — grasps this revolution's true dimensions. In Data and Goliath, he describes how our relationships with government, corporations and each other are transformed by ordinary, once-ephemeral human interactions being stored in digital media. The seemingly meaningless, incidental bits of data that we shed are turning the concept of privacy into an archaism, despite half-hearted (and doomed) regulations to protect “personally identifiable information”. As science-fiction pioneer Isaac Asimov wrote some 30 years ago: “Things just seem secret because people don't remember. If you can recall every remark, every comment, every stray word made to you or in your hearing and consider them all in combination, you find that everyone gives himself away in everything.

Schneier paints a picture of the big-data revolution that is dark, but compelling; one in which the conveniences of our digitized world have devalued privacy. Interest in privacy has dropped by 50% over the past decade — at least according to Google Trends.