Big Data: Call for your words and images

Our three-part series on Big Data is an invitation to discussion.
We’re looking for YOUR best stories, essays and images related to Big Data in ecology and environmental science. We’ll highlight excerpts from our favorites here on our blog will be available within the comments of this blog.

We’re aiming to represent a range of ideas as well as cultivate deep discussions around focused subtopics. As long as it relates to Big Data and ecology/environmental science it’s fair game, but we are particularly interested in discussion of the following points:

• What’s one of the biggest challenges of ecological Big Data, and how can/should we address it (or what is someone already doing to address it)?
• What are your biggest concerns about using data you didn’t collect yourself?
• What does Big Data mean for ecological and environmental science careers? For science education?

Read our Big Data series for inspiration:

• Part I: The “Big” in Ecological Big Data
• Part II: Sharing the Challenges and Payoffs of Big Data
• Part III: Other People’s Data

What’s in it for me/why should I submit my work?

We hope that by gathering your ideas and perspectives in one place, we will help a lot of thinkers, speakers and do-ers find each other, make their individual and collective efforts more visible to the science community, and potentially catalyze more and varied endeavors to address some of the challenges of making big data work better for the ecological science community.

What exactly are you looking for?

We’re looking for clear, engaging, thoughtful writing, and compelling and/or thought-provoking imagery. We’re looking for informal pieces, such as blog posts, that range from conversational to magazine-like.

What aren’t you looking for?

We’re not looking for journal articles or technical abstracts, though ruminating on one can be a good starting point for an essay.

What is eligible for submission?

Submissions must be:

Written or graphical work that is publicly available online. It may be published on your website/blog, your Flickr account, or someone else’s website with your name on it. If you don’t have a blog or other online presence where you can post it, ask us about guest posting here.

Your original work. If the provenance of any part of the piece is questionable, we won’t accept it. If there are any images accompanying your writing, please make sure you have permission to use them and that they are properly credited to the original authors with a text credit and a link back to the source. Similarly, if you are submitting work you were paid by someone else to create, make sure you have permission to do so.

How do I participate?

Write a comment on this post with a link to the work in the text of your comment. We’ll compile submissions on an ongoing basis.

Can I submit something I wrote last year?

Sure. In fact, we may contact you if we find a blog post or image of yours that we would like to feature in our gallery.