General – Data Big and Small

New year, new job, new life…

Yes I must admit it: I didn’t keep my new-year-2015 promise of posting more often on my blog… and the annual report I received yesterday from WordPress, showing a couple of peaks of activity and frigthening silence the rest of the year, isn’t something I would be proud to share… but I have a justification! Seriously, it’s not just an excuse – it’s that I’ve been busy trying to change life… and yes, I managed. On Monday 4 January, I’ll start an exciting new position as senior research scientist at the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS, or in French, Centre national de la recherche scientifique) in Paris. CNRS can be loosely compared to what is, in other countries, a National Research Council, but there’s more to it than international comparisons might vaguely suggest: this is probably the single most desired job in French academia, with a mission “to contribute to the development of knowledge… in all fields that contribute to the advancement of society“. In plain words, that’s basically pure research with almost no teaching apart from some PhD supervision… a dream that would hardly be possible in the UK, where I was before.

I’ll be at the Lab for Computer Science (LRI, Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique, UMR8623) on the Saclay campus, and I’ll work with the A&O (Learning and Optimization) research team. The interesting thing is that mine is an interdisciplinary position, designed to facilitate dialogue and collaboration between the social sciences and computer science around big data and their use for the advancement of knowledge, policy, and more generally society. I have been especially selected by the sociology section of CNRS to work in a computer science research centre. There, I am asked to develop my personal, long-term research project on the “sharing economy” of digital platforms and how they create value from the social ties in which economic action is embedded: this will require blending my research on data, social networks and the digital economy with machine learning and optimization approaches (more on this later … yes on this blog! promise!).

What else will I do this year at LRI? I am in the organising committee of the Second European Social Networks Conference which will take place in Paris next June, I am finishing a book on so-called “pro-anorexia” websites as the conclusion of my past project ANAMIA, and I am in the Editorial Board of Revue Française de Sociologie.

I won’t entirely forget England though… I’ll keep my doctoral students at Greenwich and continue my engagement at UCL’s Institute of Education as external examiner. Come on, you can’t just disappear after six years! Indeed, I’ll always remember those six years as most productive and fulfilling ones. And however happy I am now to join CNRS, I’ll never forget the expressions of love, sympathy and friendliness I received from colleagues and students when I left Greenwich in December. The cards, the presents, the parties… all beyond any expectations I might have had before! Thank you Greenwich. And well, yes, a big thank you to all those who made it possible – both those in London who made me have a great time far from home for so long, and those in Paris who helped me come back, not without effort, and have welcomed me now.

A great new year is about to start, and I promise I’ll document it more… 😉

2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,100 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 52 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

#bigdataBL

On Friday last week, the British Sociological Association (BSA) held an event on “The Challenge of Big Data” at the British Library. It was interesting, stimulating and relevant – I was particularly impressed by the involvement of participants and the very intense live-tweeting, never so lively at a BSA event! And people were particularly friendly and talkative both on their keyboards and at the coffee tables… so in honour of all this, I am choosing the hashtag of the day #bigdataBL as title here.

(Visualisation: http://www.digitalcoeliac.com/)

Some highlights:

The designation of “big data” is from industry, not (social) science, said a speaker at the very beginning. And it is known to be fuzzy. Yet it becomes a relevant object of scientific inquiry in that it is bound to affect society, democracy, the economy and, well, social science.
Big-data practices change people’s perception of data production and use. Ordinary people are now increasingly aware that a growing range of their actions and activities are being digitally recorded and stored. Data are now a recognized social object.
Big data needs to be understood in the context of new forms of value production.
So, social scientists need to take note (and this was the intended motivation of the whole event). The complication is that Big Data matter for social science in two different ways. First, they are an object of study in themselves – what are their implications for, say, inequalities, democratic participation, the distribution of wealth. Second, they offer new methods to be exploited to gain insight into a wide range of (traditional and new) social phenomena, such as consumer behaviours (think of Tesco supermarket sales data).
Put differently, if you want to understand the world as it is now, you need to understand how information is created, used and stored – that’s what the Big Data business is all about, both for social scientists and for industry actors.

Continue reading “#bigdataBL”

Big data: Quantity or quality?

The very designation of “Big” Data suggests that size of datasets is the dividing line, distinguishing them from “Small” Data (the surveys and questionnaires traditionally used in social science and statistics). But is that all – or are there other, and perhaps more profound, differences?

Let’s start from a well-accepted, size-based definition. In its influential 2011 report, McKinsey Global Institute depicts Big Data as:

“datasets whose size is beyond the ability of typical database software tools to capture, store, manage, and analyze”.

Similarly, O’Reilly Media (2012) defines it as:

“data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems”.

The literature goes on discussing how to quantify this size, typically measured in terms of bytes. McKinsey estimates that:

“big data in many sectors today will range from a few dozen terabytes to multiple petabytes (thousands of terabytes)”

This is not set in stone, though, depending on both technological advances over time and specific industry characteristics.

Continue reading “Big data: Quantity or quality?”