Size Is Only Half the Story:
Valuing the Dimensionality of BIG DATA

Recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of “big data” in human communication research and technology studies deserve an outline of the value of anthropology, as a particular kind of “big data”.

Mary L. Gray, Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, will walk through the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of “big data”. She argues for attending to different dimensions rather than scales of data, more collaborative approaches to how we arrive at what we (think we) know, and critical analysis of the cultural assumptions embedded in the data we collect. By moving from the “snapshot” of quantitative work to the