The document discusses challenges related to big data, including: - Big data is fundamentally networked and relational, with value coming from connections between data points rather than size alone. - There are concerns about digital divides limiting access to big data, as well as ethical issues around how data is accessed and used. - Definitions of knowledge and objectivity can be challenging with big data, as data lacks historical context and equivalency between different data sources is unclear.

1. The Sociology of Nothingness:
Challenges of Big Data
Eugen Glăvan
Research Institute for Quality of Life
Towards the Good Society - European Perspectives
Bucharest, 24-26 October 2013

2. Big Data: the horizon of expectations
Change the instruments, and you will change the entire
social theory that goes with them.
Latour (2009)
Big data:
 Fundamentally networked. Example: human-centered computing, software to adapt to
changes (MIT Project Oxygen)
 The value come from the structure of information itself.
 Not because of its size, but because of its relationality to other data.
 Digital divides: the poor big data
 Ethics
Approach:
 Analytic assumptions
 Methodological frameworks
 Underlying biases – „technological solutionism” (Morozov, 2013)
Questions: what all this data means, who gets access to it, how it is deployed, and to what ends.
(Boyd and Crawford, 2011)
Towards the Good Society - European Perspectives
Bucharest, 24-26 October 2013

3. Surname in America
1960 - 2013

4. Big Data: touch and go
Definitions of Knowledge
Harvesters of information - no historical context that is predictive. (Bollier, 2010)
Data traces: from personal networks to „articulated networks” and „behavioral networks”.
Objectivity and Accuracy
„Friends” maximum size of a person's personal network – no one should have a friend list
greater than 150. (Friendster vs. Dunbar in gossip practices)
Bigger Data ≠ Better Data
Twitter – active vs. listen users
Facebook – public access
Data Equivalency
The networks of social media is not necessarily interchangeable.
Towards the Good Society - European Perspectives
Bucharest, 24-26 October 2013

5. UN Woman Campaign
www.unwomen.org/en/news/stories/2013/10/wo
men-should-ads
A series of ads, developed as a creative
idea for UN Women by Memac Ogilvy &
Mather Dubai, uses genuine Google
searches to reveal the widespread
prevalence of sexism and discrimination
against women. Based on searches dated
9 March, 2013 the ads expose negative
sentiments ranging from stereotyping as
well as outright denial of women’s rights.

6. Big Data: feminin-ism, masculin-ism

7. Big Data: Issue Crawler
Network location and visualization software www.issuecrawler.net/
Characteristics:
 Crawlers
 Databases
 Analysis engine
 Visualization module
Utilization:
 Allows examination of a website, captures the outlinks and performs analysis to
determine points in common, degree of separation or inter-linking.
 Retain the more links to / from site to identify limits of the network.
Limits:
 The existence of the link does not say anything about traffic
 Lack of contextual information
 Influence of large and popular sites (search engines or social media)
Towards the Good Society - European Perspectives
Bucharest, 24-26 October 2013

9. DDOS on VideoLAN
downloads infrastructure

10. Normalized Google Distance – NGD (Rudi L. Cilibrasi and Paul M.B. Vitanyi): using the
probability of occurrence of a term x to extract the meaning of the words in the world wide
web.
f(x) and f(y) the number of results returned from the search terms x and y
f(x,y) denotes the number of pages that contain both terms,
N is the total number of pages that Google indexes
Measures of Semantic Relatedness - MSR)
Big Data: familly science
Towards the Good Society - European Perspectives
Bucharest, 24-26 October 2013

11. Big Data: science, pseudoscience
Towards the Good Society - European Perspectives
Bucharest, 24-26 October 2013

12. Thank you!
Eugen Glăvan
eugen@iccv.ro
Research Institute for Quality of Life
Towards the Good Society - European Perspectives
Bucharest, 24-26 October 2013