Year: 2014
Type: article
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? The Technical TerrainA common answer is that big data approaches have been produced by our current technological capacities: that the steady drumbeat of Moore's Law, the doubling of integrated circuits every two years, has brought us to a point where massive amounts of data can be easily gathered, stored, analyzed and interlinked.Apache's Hadoop, a common big data platform that utilizes distributed nodes to act as processing and analysis clusters, was launched in 2005-reinforcing the idea of big data's newness.Yet
Authors: Kate Crawford, Kate Miltner, Mary L. Gray
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems and Management
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1554722499