16. Big Data and social research – 2 years on
Next month will be two years since my first post. Back then examples of big data in social research and evaluation were more limited and the courses on offer were not so specialised for a social research audience. Things are different today. 1) A wider range of social research methods courses connected to big data, […]
12. Back to reading, Bit by Bit
I paused efforts on an introductory course on machine learning and statistical inference after finding Professor Matthew J. Salganik’s draft book, Bit by Bit: social research in the digital age, which has been available for open peer review since summer 2016 (click on the book title to access it, and here to learn about the […]
11. Jumping through Hadoops
Week one of the course introduced Apache Hadoop software, used for distributed processing of massive unstructured data, week two took us deeper into accessing and operating on big data and took me far, far away from my comfort zone. The least geeky explanations of Hadoop and MapReduce that I could find are here and here […]
10. Getting going with big data analytics
After social media analytics I signed up for this Big Data Analytics programme. Also by Queensland University of Technology, it is a series of four courses covering the collecting, storing and managing (week 1); statistical inference and machine learning (week 2); mathematical modelling (week 3) and data visualisation (week 4). (As an aside for anyone […]
7. A first attempt at social media analytics
My first, uninformed answer to the question what is big data? was ‘stuff off social media’. In particular, social media familiar to me and that is accessible – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Much of the content on Facebook or Instagram is shared ‘privately’ between users that are connected to each other in a closed network. Twitter, being a […]
4. Examples of big data in social research
Despite the challenges, there are many interesting examples where social research communities in the UK are engaging with big data. The social research institute NatCen leads a network for people using or seeking to use social media in social science research. Researchers contribute to a blog about methods and practice, with some very practical insights. […]
3. Challenges & opportunities with big data
The American Evaluation Association 2015 Conference salon on big data and evaluation sent a clear message that big data is an addition to the tool box, leading to evolution in evaluation, rather than revolution against traditional methods and approaches to scientific inquiry (more detail here). Pages 4-12 of this report, from Aspen Institute’s roundtable on […]
2. What is Big Data?
There is no single definition of big data, which has only become a commonly used term since about 2011. More formal definitions tend to include a combination of ‘V’s plus a need for specialist software to process these very large and complex datasets (rather than, for example, Microsoft Access or Excel). volume (entries that take […]
1. Big data and social research
What is big data? What does it mean for the work I do? What is the role for big data in evaluation? What skills or and experience do I need to develop? As you can probably tell from the questions, I am not a programmer, statistician or data scientist. I have quite a bit of experience analysing data […]