Big Data, Little Data, No Data

Media coverage of big data has been loud, and Christine Borgman, a professor of information studies at UCLA, asks what that hype overlooks. Her book looks at how researchers actually use data and where they run into trouble. Often the right data matter more than a large amount of it, a modest dataset can be extremely useful, and in many projects the data needed simply do not exist, cannot be located, or cannot be accessed. Sharing data is hard, the rewards for doing it are slight, and each discipline has its own habits.

Borgman, who is widely cited in the study of scholarly communication, makes the case that data carry no meaning on their own. Their value depends on the knowledge infrastructure around them, a network of people, practices, technologies, institutions, physical objects, and relationships. She opens with six provocations, deliberately framed to spark debate about how data function in scholarship. She then examines data practices in the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities, and finally weighs what these findings mean for research methods and science policy. Her central argument is that keeping data usable over the long term will require substantial investment in infrastructure, and that the future of scholarship depends on it.