Big data: The revolution is digitized

Big Data: The Management Revolution

Consider retailing. Booksellers in physical stores could always track which books sold and which did not. If they had a loyalty program, they could tie some of those purchases to individual customers. And that was about it. Once shopping moved online, though, the understanding of customers increased dramatically. Online retailers could track not only what customers bought, but also what else th...

Awaiting the second big data revolution

“Big data” has been heralded as the agent of a third industrial revolution–one with raw materials measured in bits, rather than tons of steel or barrels of oil. Yet the industrial revolution transformed not just how firms made things, but the fundamental approach to value creation in industrial economies. To date, big data has not achieved this distinction. Instead, today’s successful big data ...

Big data or bust: realizing the microbial genomics revolution

Pathogen genomics has the potential to transform the clinical and public health management of infectious diseases through improved diagnosis, detection and tracking of antimicrobial resistance and outbreak control. However, the wide-ranging benefits of this technology can only fully be realized through the timely collation, integration and sharing of genomic and clinical/epidemiological metadat...

Big data and surgery: The digital revolution continues.

On Data, Big Data and Social Research. Is It a Real Revolution?

This chapter aims at discussing critically some epistemological assumptions underlying a data science for social research. For this purpose, it is discussed the general notion of big data and the meaning of key-concepts such as those of information and data, mainly considering contributions coming from the science and technology studies (STS) and the sociology of quantification. In particular, ...