Gary King on big data analysis /
About this Podcast: The data revolution is upon us. It's said that in the last two years, more data has been created than has ever been created before. And in two years' time, we'll be able to say the same thing. For Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and di...
| Other Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Audio eBook |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
London :
SAGE Publications, Ltd.,
2017.
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| Series: | Social Science Bites.
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Connect to this podcast |
| Summary: | About this Podcast: The data revolution is upon us. It's said that in the last two years, more data has been created than has ever been created before. And in two years' time, we'll be able to say the same thing. For Gary King, the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, it is not the growth in the volume of data which is changing the world, it is the ability to use it. King describes big data as "the change in the world in which lots of things produce data." This data itself is not inherently useful; the question is whether you can make it useful. In this conversation King uses text analysis as an example of big data analytics. Social media has likely brought with it the largest increase in the expressive capacity of the human race in the history of the world. Roughly 650 million social media messages are produced every day. So, to someone trying to make statements about what those messages contain, would having 750 million messages make anything better? "Having bigger data," King says, "only makes things more difficult." The real innovation is in the ways of analysing those data. King goes on to discuss the development of a sophisticated technique for analysing social media posts according to the needs of social scientists, valuing the trend of what people are saying over individual categorisations. He describes how a "mathematically similar" project, which utilised a database of Chinese social media posts, led to an insight into the how and why of Chinese government censorship, and to a further surprising revelation. After discussing the supposed failure of polls in predicting Trump's presidency, King concludes with a rumination on big data's characterisation as a democratising, or manipulative, force. |
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| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (podcast (26 min., 10 sec.)) |
| ISBN: | 9781526459824 1526459825 |