Big Data

4A Practical Big Data Use Case

So far, we have highlighted the practices associated with big data and their computational processing. The mythology of big data is contradictory to the practical modalities of exploiting digital footprints from the web, while the digital humanities hypothetically represent a configuration realized in practice by data sciences, themselves loaded with the mythology of artificial intelligence. The status of data and processing techniques constitute both elements of epistemological questioning and steps in the processes involved in knowledge production using digital footprints. The status of the data arises with the constitution of the corpus, while what data sciences do to the data materializes during their actual processing. In explaining these two components, data and computation, we have also highlighted the simultaneous need for a third component and a third step to bring intelligibility to the data: the question of interpreting computation results, and the role of hermeneutics in the production of valid knowledge.

Moreover, the way we have examined the data and the computation has so far remained rather general, with an ambition to describe the characteristics common to all computational processing of digital footprints. While the analysis of the general conditions of knowledge generation in this context has been a significant part of the research work presented here, the examination of a more specific case has also been a significant component, ...