The point of big data is to make better decisions. But how can you deliver on the promises of big data if you cannot process or make sense of that data? One of the problems of working with big data is that the data sets involved are so large and complex that traditional data processing applications and methods are unable to process them in a timely or cost efficient manner. This is the challenge facing many researchers and data scientists across the disciplines.
This week, Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd and his colleagues will be participating in a series of workshops and seminars on big data practices at various universities in the UK including: University of Manchester, Goldsmiths University of London, and the London School of Economics. The aim of these various workshops and seminars is to provoke questions about the formation and force of data, the claims made for and through data, and the practices and politics of data. As an expert in social big data analysis and social network analysis, Dr. Gruzd will explore the increasing interest in data analytics and data practices in the social sciences. As part of his presentation, he will be introducing Netlytic, a cloud-based text and social networks analyzer that we are developing at the Social Media Lab. Netlytic is designed to help social scientists to automatically summarize large volumes of text and discover social networks from online conversations on social media sites such as Twitter, Youtube, blogs, online forums and chats.
The first event is a workshop at the University of Manchester on “Outreach / Impact Aspects” of Social Media on society on Monday February 17th, 2014 in Manchester, England. The second event is on Wednesday February 19th, 2014 at Goldsmiths University of London. At Goldsmiths, Dr. Gruzd will be joining Dr. Evelyn Ruppert of Goldsmiths and fellow members of the Editorial Team of a new SAGE journal, Big Data & Society (BD&S) in a half-day seminar on different aspects of Big Data Practices. Scheduled to launch in June 2014, BD&S is an open access peer-reviewed scholarly journal that publishes interdisciplinary work principally in the social sciences, humanities, and computing and their intersections with the arts and natural sciences about the implications of big data for society. The third event is a presentation at the London School of Economic on “Research at the Social Media Lab.”