Rational thoughts about Big Data

More and more people notice that Big Data time has been coming. Engineers, computer scientists, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, physicists, sociologists and lots of many other fields researchers and workers need to analyze and get more results from the large amount of information and data in the world.

More and more people begin to notice the potential benefits about analyzing information and with analyzing the large amount of information, the analyzing cost become another question mark in people’s mind, in addition, some other doubts jump into people’s mind about the effects of analyzing massive information. In the same time, Big Data, as a new words term, steps into people’s sight.

In the beginning, big data existed in the supercomputers and now, the big data could be analyzed in the personal computers with common software, so people realize that big data is not famous because of the “big” size, but it is well-known by analyzing the relationship in the “big” size data. In another word, as a new data ecosystem, big data stresses more on relationship in the data sets and the value of big data is from getting the correlation between different parts of data, the single data’s characteristics in the data sets and the arrangement of the data sets. Now, big data becomes an analytic phenomenon in university world and social world.

Based on these situations, some analysts and researchers think that they could hold everything in the analyzing process; however, it is significant for us to notice the problems existing in the analytic assumptions, methodological frameworks, and underlying biases in big data phenomenon. There are six provocations for big data, firstly, automating research changes the definition of knowledge; secondly, claims to objectivity and accuracy are misleading; thirdly, bigger data are not always better data; fourthly, not all data are equivalent; fifthly, just because it is accessible doesn’t make it ethical; finally, limited access to big data creates new digital divides. Maybe there are not only six provocations for big data and with the development of big data and with the wide application of big data, there may be more doubts and more provocations for big data, but with the provocations, we could use Big Data more rationally and improve Big Data analyzing method to a better condition.