Data Analytics and Epistemology

Data Analytics and Epistemology

Epistemology and Big Data

Brigitte Jordan

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At the end of EPIC 2013, in an email exchange with Natalie Hansen, Mark Vanderbeeken made an important comment when he wrote: “The central question is epistemological: What can we say about the world, considering what kind of methodological access we have.”

Mark’s comment raises some heavy issues in the ongoing Big Data conversation at EPIC and elsewhere. It asks essentially how is our understanding of the world shaped by our current methods, and does that change or need to change in the face of the emergence of Big Data. The fundamental question we are all working with is: what is new and what remains the same.

Our access to the world is primordially through our senses. This is as close to the world we live in as we can get. What it looks like to us is determined by the kinds of sensory pattern recognition capabilities we have built for ourselves through millions of years of evolutionary history. We know that this is an incomplete picture but it will do. We know that the world is full of sounds we don’t hear and of sights we don’t see.

We (speaking now as “wehuman beings”) have broadened this original sensory equipmentby building tools that do two things: they improve our built-in, hard-wired bodily senses and they also add new, external sensory capabilities that are culturally soft-wired. Thus we have X-rays to see the bones inside a living being, or touch-sensors that can detect touches our skin can’t. But these secondary (external, electronic, mechanical, chemical) sensors are not directly linked to our brains the same way our physical senses are. Rather, they are linked via re-presentationswhich can be apprehended by our senses. Thus we can look at an X-ray print and “see” the bones, or at the graphical output of a touch-sensor to understand the intensity of the touch that our hand can’t feel. The point is that a large amount of what we know about the world is not direct experience but comes from representations that our seeing and measuring tools have substituted for our direct experiences. [[1]]Insert from reading. The substitution passes for what we know about our environment.

At this point of our cultural development, there are primarily two types of re-presentations that the species understands well: first of all pictures, including paintings and photographs (taking advantage of our strong visual/cortical connections) and, secondly, graphic representations that we have developed over millennia of cultural evolution through statistics, metrology, cartology, and other culturally standardized representational practices. Who doesn’t know a normal curve or derive an intuitive meaning offa horizontal/vertical graph? It goes without saying that different cultures at different times have developed their own ways of recreating reality through their own shared devices.

Thus our understanding of the world is always secondary – mediated first of all by the capabilities of our senses and then by the reconstructive representations provided by our tools. In our research there is no unmediated access to the world and in that sense all of our data are “contaminated.” The activities as they originally occurred are fixated in some limited form, the fixation imposed by the kinds of tools and methods we use to produce the data we are working with and from which we derive our claims about the world. It is up to us to understand the nature of that transformation.

Now what does that mean for Big Data and Mark’s question? The first insight is that Big Data, whatever it is doing, is not providing direct access to the world. As a matter of fact, one might argue that it constitutes a particularly torturous path through a thicket where there may be no connection between intended course and outcome. Rather it has to be understood as a complex, mixed compilation of highly manipulated data streams that have been selected according to different interests, “cleansed”, and combined in ways that may or may not lead to particular outcomes.

Given that insight, let’s take a closer look at what it is that we are talking about about BD?

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