Socialising Big Data: From concept to practice

The working paper is a report on an ESRC-funded project, Socialising Big Data, that sought to address problematic conceptions of Big Data in popular discourse such as the ‘data deluge’ and the tendency to reduce the term to definitions such as the oft-cited ‘3 Vs’. Instead, building on how social scientists have conceived of things, methods and data as having social and cultural lives, the project sought to identify the normative, political and technical imperatives and choices that come to shape Big Data at various moments in its social lives. Recognising that Big Data involves distributed practices across a range of fields, the project experimented with collaboratories as a method for bringing together and engaging with practitioners across three different domains – genomics, national statistics and waste management. In this way it explored how relations between data are also simultaneously relations between people and that it is through such relations that a shared literacy and social framework for Big Data can be forged.