Category Archives: Big Data History

What’s the Big Data? 12 Definitions

Last week I got an email from UC Berkeley’s Master of Information and Data Science program, asking me to respond to a survey of data science thought leaders, asking the question “What is big data”? I was especially delighted to … Continue reading

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3 Big Data Milestones

If you were asked to name the top three events in the history of the IT industry, which ones would you choose? Here’s my list: June 30, 1945: John Von Neumann published the First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, … Continue reading

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The OED, Big Data, and Crowdsourcing

The term “big data” was included in the most recent quarterly online update of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). So now we have a most authoritative definition of what recently became big news: “data of a very large size, typically to the extent that its … Continue reading

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A Very Short History of Big Data

In addition to researching A Very Short History of Data Science, I have also been looking at the history of how data became big. Here I focus on the history of attempts to quantify the growth rate in the volume … Continue reading

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