Talking about Big Data at Chapman, Oct 7th

In a few weeks I’ll be speaking at Chapman Town Hall, “Data Analytics and Big Data at Chapman: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue”

Date: Oct 7, 2016

Time: 12-2pm

Place: Pralle Lecture Hall, Beckman Hall 104

Description:

Analytics and big data are hot topics today, impacting all aspects of life, work, and society.  In higher education we see renewed energy for those in the fields of computer science and statistics, but also the emergence of new disciplines including computational social sciences, digital humanities, business analytics, health informatics, etc.  What is Analytics?  What is Big Data?  Is analytics just statistical modeling?  Does big data only mean tera- or petabytes?  Or is there new and different happening here?  Come and participate in an interdisciplinary dialogue about how your colleagues across the academy are approaching analytics and big data in the classroom and in their research, and what it means to them.  Contribute to the larger conversation about what it all means for Chapman.  The panel includes Erik Linstead, Kerk Kee, Hesham El-Askary, Marco Bisoffi, David Frederick, Ken Murphy, Doug Dechow, Jana Remy, Rene German, Drew Moshier and Georgiana Bostean.  We will also be joined by our new Vice President for Research, Tom Piechota, and our Chief Information Officer, Helen Norris, who will use what they learn at this Town Hall to help plan for the cyberinfrastructure of the future.

Some of the topics that I plan to address:

• What research methods am I teaching that include tools for analyzing Big Data?
• How does a world of Big Data impact Humanities-based inquiry?
• What are some examples of Humanities projects that have used Big Data and Data Analytics?

(note: the image is from the Google Ngram Viewer, showing the rise in frequency of the term Big Data in recently-published books.  You can click on it to see an expanded view of the image)