From Big Bang To Big Data

Does media history really start with a bang? More than just newspapers, television, and social networks, media are the means by which any information is communicated, from cosmic radiation traces to medieval church bells to modern identity documents. Cultures are held together as much by bookkeeping and records as they are by stories and myths. From Big Bang to Big Data is a long history of the media – how it has been established, used, and transformed from the beginning of recorded time until the present. It is not primarily a story of revolutions and innovations, but of continuities and overlaps that reveal surprising patterns across history. Many media were invented as ways to store and share information, and many have served as powerful tools for administration and control. The concerns raised about media today, whether about privacy, piracy, or anxieties over declining cultural standards, preoccupied earlier generations too. In a playful style, accompanied by more than one hundred illustrations, the authors show us how every society has been a media society in its own way. From antique graffiti to last year’s viral YouTube clip, the past is only approachable through media. From Big Bang to Big Data provides a new way of thinking about media in history – and about human societies past and present.

The motivation of this edited book is to generate an understanding about information, related concepts and the roles they play in the modern, technology permeated world. In order to achieve our goal, we observe how information is understood in domains, such as cosmology, physics, biology, neuroscience, computer science, artificial intelligence, the Internet, big data, information society, or philosophy. Together, these observations form an integrated view so that readers can better understand this exciting building-block of modern-day society. On the surface, information is a relatively straightforward and intuitive concept. Underneath, however, information is a relatively versatile and mysterious entity. For instance, the way a physicist looks at information is not necessarily the same way as that of a biologist, a neuroscientist, a computer scientist, or a philosopher. Actually, when it comes to information, it is common that each field has its domain specific views, motivations, interpretations, definitions, methods, technologies, and challenges. With contributions by authors from a wide range of backgrounds, Understanding Information: From the Big Bang to Big Data will appeal to readers interested in the impact of ‘information’ on modern-day life from a variety of perspectives.

Equal parts mail art, data visualization, and affectionate correspondence, Dear Data celebrates "the infinitesimal, incomplete, imperfect, yet exquisitely human details of life," in the words of Maria Popova (Brain Pickings), who introduces this charming and graphically powerful book. For one year, Giorgia Lupi, an Italian living in New York, and Stefanie Posavec, an American in London, mapped the particulars of their daily lives as a series of hand-drawn postcards they exchanged via mail weekly—small portraits as full of emotion as they are data, both mundane and magical. Dear Data reproduces in pinpoint detail the full year's set of cards, front and back, providing a remarkable portrait of two artists connected by their attention to the details of their lives—including complaints, distractions, phone addictions, physical contact, and desires. These details illuminate the lives of two remarkable young women and also inspire us to map our own lives, including specific suggestions on what data to draw and how. A captivating and unique book for designers, artists, correspondents, friends, and lovers everywhere.

We are living in a cyber society. Mobile devices, social media, the Internet, crime cameras, and other diverse sources can be pulled together to form massive datasets, known as big data, which make it possible to learn things we could not begin to comprehend otherwise. While private companies are using this macroscopic tool, policy-makers and evaluators have been slower to adopt big data to make and evaluate public policy. Cyber Society, Big Data, and Evaluation shows ways big data is now being used in policy evaluation and discusses how it will transform the role of evaluators in the future. Arguing that big data will play a permanent and growing role in policy evaluation, especially since results may be delivered almost in real time, the contributors declare that the evaluation community must rise to the challenge or risk being marginalized. This volume suggests that evaluators must redefine their tools in relation to big data, obtain competencies necessary to work with it, and collaborate with professionals already experienced in using big data. By adding evaluators’ expertise, for example, in theory- driven evaluation, using repositories, making value judgements, and applying findings, policy-makers and evaluators can come to make better-informed decisions and policies.

This book provides a comprehensive survey of techniques, technologies and applications of Big Data and its analysis. The Big Data phenomenon is increasingly impacting all sectors of business and industry, producing an emerging new information ecosystem. On the applications front, the book offers detailed descriptions of various application areas for Big Data Analytics in the important domains of Social Semantic Web Mining, Banking and Financial Services, Capital Markets, Insurance, Advertisement, Recommendation Systems, Bio-Informatics, the IoT and Fog Computing, before delving into issues of security and privacy. With regard to machine learning techniques, the book presents all the standard algorithms for learning – including supervised, semi-supervised and unsupervised techniques such as clustering and reinforcement learning techniques to perform collective Deep Learning. Multi-layered and nonlinear learning for Big Data are also covered. In turn, the book highlights real-life case studies on successful implementations of Big Data Analytics at large IT companies such as Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Microsoft. Multi-sectorial case studies on domain-based companies such as Deutsche Bank, the power provider Opower, Delta Airlines and a Chinese City Transportation application represent a valuable addition. Given its comprehensive coverage of Big Data Analytics, the book offers a unique resource for undergraduate and graduate students, researchers, educators and IT professionals alike.

The proposed book will discuss various aspects of big data Analytics. It will deliberate upon the tools, technology, applications, use cases and research directions in the field. Chapters would be contributed by researchers, scientist and practitioners from various reputed universities and organizations for the benefit of readers.

This edited book will serve as a source of reference for technologies and applications for multimodality data analytics in big data environments. After an introduction, the editors organize the book into four main parts on sentiment, affect and emotion analytics for big multimodal data; unsupervised learning strategies for big multimodal data; supervised learning strategies for big multimodal data; and multimodal big data processing and applications. The book will be of value to researchers, professionals and students in engineering and computer science, particularly those engaged with image and speech processing, multimodal information processing, data science, and artificial intelligence.

La colección presenta trabajos interdisciplinares que hacen uso de herramientas no solo humanistas sino también digitales para proponer enfoques inéditos sobre Literatura, Lingüística, Teoría Crítica y Filosofía en el espacio multicultural iberoamericano del siglo XXI. Las tres principales líneas de investigación - los corpus lingüísticos digitalizados, la lingüística experimental, y la relación entre Literatura, Crítica y Big Data - combinan el análisis de datos con un pensamiento crítico que trasciende el "dataísmo" y abre nuevas perspectivas (biopolítica, feminista y decolonial) en las Humanidades Digitales. The series presents interdisciplinary studies harnessing humanistic as well as digital tools to offer innovative approaches to literary studies, linguistics, critical theory and philosophy in the multicultural Ibero-American space of the 21st century. Its three principal lines of research - digital linguistic corpora, experimental linguistics, and the relation between literature, critique and big data - combine data analysis with critical thinking that transcends mere "dataism" and opens new (biopolitical, feminist, decolonial...) perspectives within Digital Humanities.