Data Acquisition vs. Data Overload

Written on 03/25 at 12:52 PM by Andy Posner 0 comments

Filed under: philosophy

It used to be that the greatest obstacle to doing research, be it scientific, literary, or any other kind, for that matter, was actually acquiring the requisite data. Many public libraries were underfunded, or closed when the data was needed, or otherwise inaccessible to those that sought the information contained within their walls. Academic research was-and often still is-published in exclusive academic journals, whose high cost prevented the wider dissemination of the research. The list of barriers is nearly endless.

A New Paradigm Now, with the tremendous proliferation of low-cost bandwidth and cheap data storage and computing power, many of those barriers have come down. Any time, day or night, anyone in the world can access much of the knowledge previously stored in libraries in journals, simply by doing a Google search. Even scholarly magazines are beginning to offer their findings in an "open-source format" online. Harvard has its Open-Collections Program, which provides "online access to historical resources from Harvard's renowned libraries, archives, and museums," and MIT offers Open Courseware, which enables anyone with a computer and internet access to 'take' a course at MIT. The list goes on, but this time it is a far more extensive list, one that comprises millions of blogs and wikis, corporate web sites, universities, encyclopedias, dictionaries, medical web sites, and so on.

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