Humanizing Big Data
This is very interesting.
For those who don’t click through, it’s an article about "The Human Face of Big Data", the latest book-project by Rick Smolan, the one-time National Geographic photographer. Smolan tries to humanize Big Data. His book is packed with portraits of how life is changing in a world filled by powerful streams of data.
I may be wrong, but I see a growing movement to humanize Big Data.
One of suggestions of FoE Conference 2012 at MIT last week is that we should balance Big Data with qualitative insights. Big Data without the "human approach" (culture and context) is useless.
Plus, one of the emerging fields in computer science is known as "memory engineering". Designed to address the current overload of information, its approach is not about aggregation, but the desire to humanize Big Data.
Timehop is an example of this field. The service plugs into your Foursquare/Facebook/Twitter and, each day, it finds your check-ins and updates from one year earlier and emails you a summary. Recalling information/data from memory (in a friendly way) is a big trend today.
I am very fascinated by this movement. I think we are putting certain technologies in the right place. The desire to humanize Big Data is an example.
That’s the future ahead.