ABSTRACT
What is “big” about big data, and how new are the modes of thinking necessary to analyze it? This chapter profiles three dimensions of data that are changing the contemporary study of our collective past: data about labour and demographics; data about climate; and textual data. The chapter argues that encounters with “big data”, therefore, have required scholars to raise new questions about how we know what we know about the past and frequently to participate in new kinds of scholarly cooperations and institutional alignments. These developments foreground the necessity for special kinds of critical thinking, especially those that combine humanistic and scientific, quantitative, and narrative thought and those that reflect on the life of data and where it comes from.
