Gary King on big data analysis
"In this Social Science Bite, Professor Gary King, uses text analysis as an example of this big data analysis. He notes that some of the tools that text analysis uses are 'mathematically similar' to another project he worked on, trying to determine health priorities in the third world by figuring out what’s killing people there. In both cases, the individual, whether someone with a disease or someone with a viral tweet, is less important than the trend."
“The data itself isn’t likely to be particularly useful; the question is whether you can make it useful.”
King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard. He’s been elected a fellow or eight honorary societies, including the National Academy of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
To hear the entire interview with Sandy Pentland click HERE. The podcast appears as part of the celebrated Social Science Bites podcast series which appears exclusively at the Social Science Space website. To see the entire catalog of past interviews with many of the planet’s most interesting social scientists, click HERE.
This blog post was written by Philip Patino employee at SAGE Publishing under PR Conventions and Social Science Department. As a SAGE employee he helps manage and edits the SAGE hosted sites MethodSpace and Social Science Space.