Caroline O’Donovan writes:
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukier published their joint tome on big data this week, Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work and Think. Mayer-Schönberger, a professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford, and Cukier, the data editor of The Economist, argue that having access to vast amounts of data will soon overwhelm our natural human tendency to look for correlation and causality where there is none. In the near future, we’ll be able to rely on much larger pools of “messy” data rather than small pools of “clean” data to get more accurate answers to our questions.
“We are taking things we never thought of as informational and rendering them in data,” Mayer-Schönberger said in a talk Wednesday at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard. “Once we think of it as data, we can organize it and extract new information.”
In their book, Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier give a number of examples of industries that will be changed forever by the new messiness of data. Bradford Cross cofounded FlightCaster.com, which predicted U.S. flight delays using data about flight times and weather patterns. The company was sold in 2011, at which point “Cross turned his sights on another aging industry.” He started Prismatic, one of a number of news aggregators that filters content for users by analyzing data about sharing frequency on social networks and user preferences.
Caroline quotes Cukier on “interviewing databases,” saying:
When we teach journalism in the future, we’re not just going to teach people the fundamentals of how to do an interview, or what a lede paragraph is. We’re going to tell people how to interview databases. And also, just as we train journalists by telling them that sometimes people that we interview are unfaithful and lie, we’re going to have to teach them to be suspicious of the data, because sometimes the data lies, too. You have to bring the same scrutiny as in the analog world — talking to people and observing — to the data as well.
I like the image of interviewing a database.
How many times do you think a database will be asked the same questions by different reporters?
Do you think recording and sharing those answers would save other reporters time and resources?
How about enabling other reporters to ask questions you forgot or didn’t know enough to ask?
If any of that rings a bell, there may be topic maps in your future.