Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data

Today the term " big data " is often used in popular media, business, computer science and computer industry. For instance, in June 2008 Wired magazine opened its special section on " The Petabyte Age " by stating: " Our ability to capture, warehouse, and understand massive amounts of data is changing science, medicine, business, and technology. As our collection of facts and figures grows, so will the opportunity to find answers to fundamental questions " (" The Petabyte Age "). In February 2010, Economist started its special report " Data, data everywhere " with the phrase " the industrial revolution of data " (coined by computer scientist Joe Hellerstein) and then went to note that " The effect is being felt everywhere, from business to science, from government to the arts " (" Data, data everywhere "). Discussions in popular media usually do not define " big data " in qualitative terms. However, in computer industry the term has a more precise meaning: " Big Data is a term applied to data sets whose size is beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, manage, and process the data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data sizes are a constantly moving target currently ranging from a few dozen terabytes to many petabytes of data in a single data set " (" Big data ").. Since its formation in 2008, NEH Office of Digital Humanities has been systematically creating grant opportunities to help humanists work with large data sets. The following statement from 2011 grant competition organized by NEH together with a number of other research agencies in USA, Canada, UK, and Netherlands provides an excellent description of what is at stake: " The idea behind the Digging into Data Challenge is to address how "big data" changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Now that we have massive databases of materials used by scholars in the humanities and social sciences-ranging from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data like web searches, sensor data or cell phone records-what new, computationally-based research methods might we apply? As the world becomes increasingly digital, new techniques will be needed to search, analyze, and understand these everyday materials. " (" Digging into Data Challenge "). The projects funded by 2009 Digging Into Data Challenge and earlier NEH 2008 Humanities High Performance Computing grant program begin to map the …