I have recently read and will soon review a book, Christine L. Borgman’s Big Data, Little Data, No Data: Scholarship in the Networked World (MIT Press 2015), that increased substantially my understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of data in various sizes with almost unlimited applications. I highly recommend this book to those who, as was I until I read it, confused about several key business issues, several of potentially great significance.
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“Big Data” is on the covers of Science, Nature, the Economist, and Wired magazines, on the front pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. But despite the media hyperbole, as Christine Borgman points out in Big Data, Little Data, No Data, having the right data is usually better than having more data; little data can be just as valuable as big data. In many cases, there are no data — because relevant data don’t exist, cannot be found, or are not available. Moreover, data sharing is difficult, incentives to do so are minimal, and data practices vary widely across disciplines.
An often-cited authority on scholarly communication, Borgman argues that data have no value or meaning in isolation; they exist within a knowledge infrastructure — an ecology of people, practices, technologies, institutions, material objects, and relationships. After laying out the premises of her investigation — six “provocations” meant to inspire discussion about the uses of data in scholarship — Borgman offers case studies of data practices in the sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and then considers the implications of her findings for scholarly practice and research policy. To manage and exploit data over the long term, Borgman argues, requires massive investment in knowledge infrastructures; at stake is the future of scholarship.
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Christine L. Borgman is Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also the author of From Gutenberg to the Global Information Infrastructure and Scholarship in the Digital Age, also published by the MIT Press.