Big Data + Libraries

Does a set of data make you feel more comfortable? More successful? Then your interpretation of it is likely wrong. In a surprisingly moving talk, Susan Etlinger explains why, as we receive more and more data, we need to deepen our critical thinking skills. Because it's hard to move beyond counting things to really understanding them.

What value might a social science or humanities researcher find in a million poems or a million newspaper pages? And how might society benefit? What potential do huge repositories of digitised data hold for this kind of research? That's the question at the heart of the Digging into Data challenge and it's resulting in some unusual and exciting collaborations.