The story of Eliot Higgins, a blogger who exploits publicly accessible material to piece together important facts about the Syrian conflict, offers a unique insight into the enormous potential of open-source intelligence. Matthew Moran describes how the networked society has spawned new analytical approaches and opportunities. In November 2013, the New Yorker published a profile of Eliot Higgins – or Brown Moses as he is known to almost 17,000 Twitter followers. […]
Category: big data
Eyes of the World: Interview with George Jungbluth of the US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration
This post is part of our ongoing NDSA innovation group’s Insights interview series. Scientific data is the biggest of the “big data.” In fact, research data and increased complexity and volume of data are two of the challenges addressed by the National Agenda for Digital Stewardship. To find out more about the data preservation and […]
The specter of big data is haunting the world, but has the data revolution already occurred?
Changes to the supply and demand of data are restructuring privileged hierarchies of knowledge, with amateur hackers and machine-readable technology becoming a central part of its analysis. Traditional experts may be hoping for a gradual evolution, but a parallel revolution led by practitioners in the private sector may already be underway. Prasanna Lal Das argues that partnerships will need to incorporate […]
Impact Round-Up 25th January: Anonymity, metadata, and tacit knowledge vs reproducible results.
Managing Editor Sierra Williams presents a round-up of popular stories from around the web on higher education, academic impact, and trends in scholarly communication. 1. The role of anonymity in the blogosphere and in science took centre stage this week when a … Continue reading →
Two New Exciting Research Data Infrastructure Projects: Or From Soup to Nuts and Back (Maybe)
We hear a constant stream of news about how crunching massive data collections will change everything from soup to nuts. Here on The Signal, it’s fair to say that scientific research data is close to the heart of our hopes, dreams and fears when it comes to big data: we’ve written over two-dozen posts touching on […]
The availability of open data and new trends in data visualisation will transform how we understand our cities.
Due to the increasing availability of large urban datasets, it is now becoming easier to produce online visualisations that capture and help interpret the complex spatial dynamics of cities. Duncan A. Smith argues that as further open datasets are made available, … Continue reading →
Astronomical Data and Astronomical Digital Stewardship: An interview with Brian Schmidt
The following is a guest post from Jane Mandelbaum, co-chair of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance Innovation Working group and IT Project Manager at the Library of Congress. As part of our ongoing series of insights discussions with individuals doing innovative work related to digital preservation and stewardship I am excited to talk with Brian Schmidt. Brian […]
Five recommendations for maximising the relevance of social science research for policy-making in the big data era
The quantity and influence of generalisable data presents challenges and opportunities for public policy making. Helen Margetts discusses how social scientists can help policy-makers in this changed environment, ensuring that social science research remains relevant, and warns that social science … Continue reading →
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)?…
Macrosystems Biology: How to share, manage and cite big data and team science?
Last month, I participated in the first Principal Investigator meeting of NSF’s new Macrosystems Biology program. The NSF solicits proposals to “support quantitative, interdisciplinary, systems-oriented research on biosphere processes and their complex interactions with climate, land use, and invasive species at regional to continental scales.”
The first groups of projects cover an incredible range of topics, and are embracing a wide range of research approaches. In a pre-meeting survey, projects reported using simulation models, developing new theory, fitting empirical models to multi-scaled data, analyzing paleoecological data and implementing experiments across linked networks ofsites. Almost half the groups reflected the newness of the continental-scale approach by including significant educational activities.…