Big Data, the crowd and me

Like many of you, I’ve been swept up by the romance of Big Data. But instead of stepping back and taking the long view, in this account I plan to get enmired in the details and tell you a story about my own Big Data dalliance. Furthermore, in an effort to explore some fresh territory, I’m not going to take a curatorial perspective (see, for example, Borgman, Wallis, and Mayernik, 2010, or Tibbo et al., 2009), nor address the challenges of data storage and processing (e.g. Yu et al., 2008) or data sharing (e.g. Reichman, Jones, and Schildhauer, 2011). Instead, I’m going to look outside of the pool of light, in among the digital dust bunnies, to see if I can tell a slightly different, more personal story about what someone like me (a qualitative researcher) might need to know to be part of a Big Data effort (bearing in mind boyd and Crawford’s (2011) thoughtful scholarly reflections on the implications of manipulating and analyzing Big Data)