posts tagged ‘big data’

Society’s Next Big Challenge: Infinite Data

14 April 2013 | Christian Fritz

Over the past 10 years or so, many organizations have recognized the conceptual value of data and have started recording and retaining more and more of it. But after doing this for a while, they’re asking, “What the heck do we do with it?”

Google, Netflix, and other big companies have taught us that data is valuable for insights that can be obtained from it, so others have started exploring their own data and want to do more with it. Some companies have been doing this in a way that sets no expectation as to what can be learned from it.

Rather than starting with a question and looking for an answer, people started finding the questions data was already answering. The idea has been to find the hidden potential of data, and we’ve already seen benefits to doing this type of analysis.

Fixed Data or Fixed Problem?

What if ...

Languages and social network behaviors: Top 10 languages on Twitter

26 April 2011 | Lichan Hong

There's a tendency on the part of designers, researchers, and others to assume that English-language users' behaviors in social networks generalize to that of other language users. But in a recent study where we examined 62 million tweets collected over a four-week period, we found significant differences in how people of different language backgrounds used features such as URLs, hashtags, mentions, replies, and retweets. But first: how did we examine this large-scale data set?