Debating Big Data

Abstract

‘Big Data’ has become a flashpoint in conversations in a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. As advances in computational methods expand the terrain of the measurable, the identifiable, and the knowable, they also raise thorny questions around the politics and ethics of academic research. In an era marked by the thoroughgoing digitalization of virtually every domain of our lives, changes in how information about human behavior is gathered, circulated, and made sense of both unsettles and reinforces existing power dynamics. This Special Crosscurrents Issue aims to spark a debate on ‘Big Data’ from the disciplinary location of ‘media and communication studies’ and more specifically, the emergent field of digital media studies. Our starting point is danah boyd and Kate Crawford’s (2011) important article, ‘Critical questions for Big Data’, in which they reflect on ‘what all this data means, who gets access to what data, how data analysis is deployed, and to what ends’ (p. 3). We asked our contributors to draw on their own research on different aspects of digital and global media as a way to respond to one of more of the issues that boyd and Crawford identified – the definition of knowledge, claims to objectivity and accuracy, context and meaning-making, access to data, and ethics and accountability. Moving well beyond the domain of social media, this collection of essays shows that the story of Big Data is part of a long-standing debate about methods and approach in