A sneak peek to this chapter’s Introduction:
«We usually associate big data with its cruder, more conventional and perhapsmore obscure applications; those of the interconnected, data-driven world, whereevery interaction and every‘like’leaves a trace, every click is recorded and pri-vacy is supervised by third parties as millions of data records are gathered frommillions of users 24 hours a day. Here are some of the figures regarding this phe-nomenon: according to Eric Schmidt, every day we generate as much data as allthe data produced by the whole of humanity in 2003 (Siegler 2010). These data aregenerated by the 4.66 billion active internet users who, to give an example, canpublish 3.3 million posts on Facebook or perform 3.3 million searches on Googleevery minute (Alonso 2020). According to the predictions for 2025, there will be163 zettabytes1of data in the world (Zgurovsky & Zaychenko 2020). In this context,one of the most common uses of big data is in digital marketing, although we canfind it everywhere, whether politics (Pascual & Peinado 2018; Rands, 2018), fi-nance, with its algorithms for surveillance and decision-making (Hasan, Popp &OlĂ¡h, 2020), health monitoring (Sun et al. 2020), the recommendation systems ofentertainment platforms (Fayyaz et al, 2020) or sports (Torgler 2020).»
Mariottini, S., Arroyo-Machado, W. & Torres-Salinas, D. (2024). A Brief Introduction to Big Data for Humanists. In A. Gallego Cuiñas & D. Torres-Salinas (Ed.), Humanities and Big Data in Ibero-America: Theory, methodology and practical applications (pp. 9-24). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110753523-002