Tag: Big data

  • Variables in quantitative reserach

    What is the difference between interval/ ratio, ordinal, nominal and categorical variables? This post answers this question! Interval/ ratio variables Where the distances between the categories are identical across the range of categories. For example, in question 2, the age intervals go up in years, and the distance between the years is same between every…

  • Knowing Capitalism and Lively Data

    Knowing Capitalism and Lively Data Nigel Thrift (2005) developed the concept of ‘knowing capitalism’ to denote a new form of global economy which depends not only on technologies which generate large amounts of digital data, but also on the commodification of that data: a big data economy in which power operates through modes of communication,…

  • Sociomaterial Perspectives on the self in digital networks

    Sociomaterial perspectives hold that datafication via digital devices (both personal and public) are fundamentally  intertwined with the way we construct our identities and ‘practice selfhood’, so much so that it is more accurate to say that today we ‘live in media’ rather than ‘we live with media’. The most obvious manifestation of the intertwining of…

  • Big Data: Controlling its Use

    Changes in the way we interact and communicate lead to changes in the way we govern ourselves and just as with the invention of the printing press resulting in the evolution of copyright and libel laws, so the emergence of big data will result in new laws to govern the new ways in which this…

  • The Risks of Big Data

    The Risks of Big Data

    There are three main risks of Big Data: the paralysis of privacy, punishment through propensity, the fetishization of and dictatorship through data 

  • The Big Data Value Chain

    There are three types of company in the big-data value chain: the companies who collect the data, data-analytics companies, and data-ideas companies. This new ‘organisational landscape’ will change the power-relations between businesses enormously, at least according to Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier (2017)  in ‘Big Data’: The Essential Guide to Life and Learning in the…

  • Problems with the fusion of  big data and education

    The first problem is that it will be more difficult for us to forget and escape our past…. While we as individuals grow, evolve and change, comprehensive educational data collected through the years remains unchanged – there is a problem that as the amount of data collected on us through our formative years, we might…

  • How will Big Data Change Social Research?

    Big data will change the nature of social research –  more data will do away with the need for sampling (and eradicated the biases that emerge with sampling); big data analysis will be messier, but this will lead to more insights and allow for greater depth of analysis; and finally it will move us away…

  • Will E-learning Platforms change Education?

    Big data enthusiasts argue that the greater data collection and analysis potential provided by e-learning platforms such as Khan Academy and Udacity provide much more immediate feedback to students about how they learn, and they thus predict a future in which schools and private data companies will work together in a new educational ecosystem… This…

  • How will Big Data Change Education?

    Big Data will make Feedback more focussed on effective teaching rather than student progress, it will make learning more individualised, and it will enable us to make probabilistic predictions about what programmes are best for different students. This is according  to Big Data enthusiasts Meyer-Schonberger and Cukier in their (2017) reprint of their 2013 original…