Trouble With Big Data

Jennifer Edmond is Associate Professor of Trinity College Dublin and the co-director of the Trinity Center for Digital Humanities, Ireland. Jennifer also serves as President of the Board of Directors of the pan-European research infrastructure for the arts and humanities, DARIAH-EU and represents this body on the Open Science Policy Platform (OSPP), which supports the European Commission in developing and promoting Open Science policies. Nicola Horsley’s qualitative research critiques the marginalisation of the social in various discourses and explores the dominance of scientific and technical knowledge as bases for policy and practice. Her co-authored book, Challenging the Politics of Early Intervention explores the scientific evidence base for early intervention policies.Jörg Lehmann is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Romanistic Seminar at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. He has published two monographs on war literature as well as several articles on hate speech, depictions of violence in the media, on the quantitative analysis of paratexts and on sentiment and emotion analysis in texts.Mike Priddy is a Senior Information Systems Engineer at Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS) based in The Hague, the Netherlands. He works across the Social Sciences and Humanities on a range of European research infrastructures and development projects, specialising in architectural, process and quality modelling as well as project management.

• IntroductionChapter 1: Data and LanguageChapter 2: Data and SensemakingChapter 3: Data and InvisibilityChapter 4: Big Data and the Abyss of AggregationChapter 5: Data and PowerConclusion

By examining the much-hyped phenomenon of ‘big data’ through a humanist lens, the authors provide a rich account of the possibilities and limits. They focus on the importance of culture and context for understanding how data are imagined, collected, analysed and understood.