A recent article (linked here) in Wired magazine, “Your Big Data Is Worthless if You Don’t Bring It into the Real World,” asks this same question. (The fact that this piece was in Wired surprised me since I had always viewed the magazine as a trumpeter of technological progress over all else.) In a well-written and thought-provoking format, Mikkel Krenchel and Christian Madsbjerg point out the discrepancies between what people might think they have learned by looking at “Google Flu Trends,” which is Google’s attempt to collect data summarizing global flu activity, versus what is actually happening with flu outbreaks. According to these two authors, the lack of “real world” exposure prevented Google Flu Trends from seeing the actual trends in the prevalence of influenza. If the people who worked on Google Flu had spent some time away from their computers, talking with people and looking at what was really occurring, they would have seen the inadequacy of their analysis, say Krenchel and Madsbjerg.
According to these two writers, “Because big data is nothing without ‘thick data,’ the rich and contextualized information you gather only by getting up from the computer and venturing out into the real world. Computer nerds were once ridiculed for their social ineptitude and told to ‘get out more.’ The truth is, if big data’s biggest believers actually want to understand the world they are helping to shape, they really need to do just that.” As one would expect, this article is about more than just the flu. As Krenchel and Madsbjerg point out, the mistakes of Google Flu Trends are not unique; all too often, people mistake data for information. They fail to comprehend that numbers without context are numbers and not much more.
Unfortunately, big data is thin data --”The sort of data you get when you look at the traces of our actions and behaviors. We travel this much every day; we search for that on the Internet; we sleep this many hours; we have so many connections; we listen to this type of music, and so forth. It’s the data gathered by the cookies in your browser, the FitBit on your wrist, or the GPS in your phone.” These facts are helpful but inconclusive. In order to understand a trend or phenomenon, we require thick data that “seeks to understand us in terms of how we relate to the many different worlds we inhabit.” We need to give these facts meaning.
So, how does this influence the way we work with students in schools? We need to help them learn the necessity of accessing both thin and thick data. They must gather quantitative information as a beginning. However, they need to see what that data means by giving it a context. Students need to understand that just as a prosecutor brandishes the murder weapon to a jury as physical evidence (thin data), without an argument or a motive (thick data), that gun is nothing more than a weapon. It’s when the members of a jury have been presented with a story and are confronted with the evidence that they can make a reasoned decision. An argument with no evidence doesn’t hold up; evidence with no argument means nothing. As they learn how to research and think, students see how to construct an argument that utilizes the purpose of narrative and the power of data. They can only achieve this when they combine what they can learn by collecting data with a computer and spending time in the physical world in which they live.
