Critiquing Big Data: Politics, Ethics, Epistemology

TLDR

Big data has rapidly permeated diverse fields such as healthcare, astronomy, policing, city planning, and advertising, becoming a term of art for large‑scale data analysis, yet its sudden surge in prominence remains poorly understood. The study aims to pose the first question about the big data phenomenon.

Abstract

Why now? This is the first question we might ask of the big data phenomenon. Why has it gained such remarkable purchase in a range of industries and across academia, at this point in the 21st century? Big data as a term has spread like kudzu in a few short years, ranging across a vast terrain that spans health care, astronomy, policing, city planning, and advertising. From the RNA bacteriophages in our bodies to the Kepler Space Telescope, searching for terrorists or predicting cereal preferences, big data is deployed as the term of art to encompass all the techniques used to analyze data at scale. But why has the concept gained such traction now?