Mark O’Connell, who recently read Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, questions whether massive data analyses “typically tell us anything that we didn’t already know”:
We get stuff about how Helen Keller was “a hero to millions, a symbol of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity” and how “Marcel Proust became famous for writing good books,” which is one of those facts so incontrovertibly true that stating it sounds a mysteriously false note. And a data-mining examination of the history of fame, whereby we learn that Adolf Hitler is the most famous person born in the past two centuries (i.e., mentioned in the most books), leads to the insight that “darkness, too, lurks among the n-grams, and no secret darker than this: Nothing creates fame more efficiently than acts of extreme evil. We live in a world in which the surest route to fame is killing people, and we owe it to one another to think about what that means.”
After a while, you begin to suspect that this sort of wan reflection might be compensating for the fact that the data itself reveal little that is new.
The book is mostly entertaining, and its authors [Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel] are an amiable presence. But the claims that they make about the impact of their work—and the larger impact of big data on the humanities—are imposingly serious. “At its core,” they write, “this big data revolution is about how humans create and preserve a historical record of their activities. Its consequences will transform how we look at ourselves. It will enable the creation of new scopes that make it possible for our society to more effectively probe its own nature. Big data is going to change the humanities, transform the social sciences, and renegotiate the relationship between the world of commerce and the ivory tower.”
We are, in other words, deep in TED territory here, where no innovation can ever be merely useful or profitable, and must always mark something like a turning point in human history.
But Quentin Hardy spots a new and highly practical trend:
What if big data, that much-proclaimed multibillion-dollar hope of the enterprise software industry, is just a feature of something else?
On Wednesday, a company called New Relic announced that its product, used by information technology professionals to monitor the performance of software applications, would also carry real-time analytics about customer usage. That is the kind of thing that is useful to marketing departments, which are now spending money on custom big data systems. “We monitor how fast an application is, why it might be taking so long to load, why a line of code’s database query took so long,” said Lew Cirne, New Relic’s founder and chief executive. But the company can also tell “not just how long it took Airbnb to load an app, but what the best price point was in New York for completing a deal, or what products on Disney are getting the most customer hits.” …
The change in the product signifies [the] tendency for software developers to work in different parts of the company — the marketing department, for example — and not just in information technology. “The big trend we’re riding is that software will be in everything, and you’ll interact with it everywhere,” said Mr. Cirne.
The Dish 