Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture

Over the summer I worked as a software developer for a defense contractor and one of the things I focused on was analyzing and working with big data. That experience sparked a big interest in me about big data and how it can be used, so I started my search by looking for books about "big data." After sorting by books written in the past couple of years and looking through a few pages I saw the title of this book and pretty instantly knew it sounded like a great choice. The description further increased my interest in the book in several ways. The first of these was how it not only talks about big data as  lens for human culture but also discusses how it has impacted many other parts of life from businesses to social media. Furthermore, the description talks about how the book was written by some of the engineers who worked on Google's nGram viewer that we looked at in class which piqued my interest because not only did we discuss that exact tool in class, but the authors are actually engineers who have worked with big data before. The reviews for this book were also fairly positive overall, giving it a 4-star rating, and many of the negative reviews criticized the author's viewpoints and ideas more so than the content of the book itself.

 Reviews

       1. http://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2013/12/26/book-review-uncharted-big-data-lens-human-culture-erez-aiden-and-jean-baptiste-michel/4ls1FOtUP9quph3FKglWEJ/story.html

2. http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/uncharted-big-data-lens-human-culture

3. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/25/books/uncharted-by-erez-aiden-and-jean-baptiste-michel.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0