To reflect and provoke!
In the last Wired News, The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn't Just More — More Is Different, they have an entry about «The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete».
So where is the method? The scientific rigour? If what they state was true, than scientist would be obsolete. Scientific method is not only about finding correlations in data. The scientific method allows for a number of triangulations: data, methods & theory. Scientific method starts from choosing what kind of data to look for, how to collect it, how to analyze, how to interpret the data.
Anyhow, it shows that the perception that having access to large amounts of data can suffice to make science :S
So where is the method? The scientific rigour? If what they state was true, than scientist would be obsolete. Scientific method is not only about finding correlations in data. The scientific method allows for a number of triangulations: data, methods & theory. Scientific method starts from choosing what kind of data to look for, how to collect it, how to analyze, how to interpret the data.
Anyhow, it shows that the perception that having access to large amounts of data can suffice to make science :S
Note to self: link to boyd, danah and Crawford, Kate, Six Provocations for Big Data (September 21, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1926431
ReplyDelete