ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief background of the big data phenomenon and locates earlier developments and uses of large textual data sets. It outlines the trajectory of contemporary growth in big data research, and the social and technological shifts that have contributed to its currency. Contemporary big data debates are somewhat analogous to the differentiation in the 1960s about big science and small science. While the “digital turn” has rendered manual, large-scale recording of daily activities virtually obsolete, situating the groundswell of interest in big data within a historical context demonstrates that the largeness of big data is not the main development. Big data have been supported by infrastructures and modes of governance of the state, and with the rise of the internet, corporate, commercial, and social data gathering. Criticism of the big data concept aside, qualitative researchers in the twenty-first century are collecting and curating increasingly larger and more varied nonstatistical data.
