All Tomorrow's Cultures

For many of us in anthropology, the advent of “big data'' represents a threat.  Why, after all, spend months developing rapport and interviewing 100 people when you can run sentiment analyses on 40 million tweets in a matter of hours?  Still, I agree with Tricia Wang , who urges us to engage big data and complement that work with our own “thick data.”  In “thick data,” the depths of our insights into meaning and interpretation, “the native’s point of view,” could act as a corrective to billions of data points that may “speak for themselves,” as Chris Anderson claimed, but not, perhaps, for people.  Ironically, this move to “thick data'' was enabled by the gradual choking off of data access to social media APIs.  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter - one by one social media platforms began limiting third-party access to their data, under the cover of protecting users from infringements on their privacy.  Well, not all third-party access.  Corporations and sele...