bigdatabigdeal

I went to a symposium at UBC last week (http://acastudentchapter.sites.olt.ubc.ca/) and the most interesting presentation, in my opinion, was by Richard Marciano: “Analyzing and Visualizing Big Cultural Data.” I didn't know (and probably should have, given I'm considered to be an Information Professional) that the White House released a statement on BIG DATA. See here.

Coincidentally, just before attending the symposium, I was on the bus reading a Guardian article about Google Search and the future of searching on the internet.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jan/19/google-search-knowledge-graph-singhal-interview


 A great quote from that article, that I think fits nicely with Big Data:
"All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected. But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships. A timeless interval was spent doing that." (John Battelle, 'The Search').

Having worked in many archives, I know that to be true. Boxes and boxes of papers, maps...
Marciano's presentation was all about that...his work is a statement on correlating and collecting and pulling together relationships between records and data.
He's been looking at old Seattle City maps that were used to "red line" particular neighbourhoods and he is looking at how this has affected fair housing policies, and cultural and racial segregation in the city in the 1920s and 30s. I was on the edge of my seat! I love when someone uses archival records and technology to make "old dusty" records relevant to us today. His argument was also that big data has always existed (e.g census data collected on paper) but our challenge now is to make that data accessible and mean something.