BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Big Data Needs Eye Candy to Go Mainstream. Here's the iPad App to Do It

This article is more than 10 years old.

By Kristen Nicole, Senior Editor at SiliconANGLE

It’s painful watching someone else explain what it is I do for a living, and it’s often just as frustrating when I’m the one doing the explaining.  It took the world long enough to understand my career choice as a blogger.  Now it’s my “beat” people can’t grasp.  I find myself constantly explaining and re-explaining big data, what it means, and why I’m so interested.

Anyone involved in big data can sympathize.  The term big data encompasses its technology, its concepts and its potential use cases, making it difficult to offer a succinct description.  But famed photojournalist Rick Smolan, known for capturing the human sentiment of emerging trends right at their onset, has found a way to define big data for the masses.

Smolan’s new book, The Human Face of Big Data, is a massive coffee table reader that bridges the gap between nerd [read early adopter] and "John Doe".  Released yesterday, there’s also a companion iPad app that offers snippets of some of the book’s most interesting stories.

Receiving an early copy in the mail just before Thanksgiving break, I left The Human Face of Big Data out on my coffee table to see how friends and family would interact with the book.  I wasn’t surprised, but certainly glad to see the snowballing interest in this collection of big data stories.  My fiance even finished the book before I did, eagerly pointing out his favorite essays, photos and case studies.

Finally, someone outside of the big data realm seemed excited to discover what this all meant.  Finally, there’s hope of seeing a glimmer of recognition when I tell people what I do for a living, chronicling the evolution of big data.

2012: The year of Big Data

Indeed, 2012 has been an extremely important year for big data, particularly in the enterprise.  Anjul Bhambhri, VP of Big Data at IBM, tells me it’s been a year of exploration, and now it’s time to implement the big data discoveries we’ve unearthed so far.  Industry rival EMC agrees, recognizing the need to streamline product portfolios around big data analytics, converged storage and software-defined networking, all of which hinge on machines’ ability to asses and commoditize data.

There’s infinite implications big data has on our economy, proving a worthy asset from the enterprise all the way down to the consumer.  Now that the business world has admitted the many perks of big data, it’s time to educate the consumer.  Just getting John Doe and his friends to talk about big data is a step in the right direction, and that’s the very reason EMC was willing to sponsor Smolan’s goal of making big data a household term.

This era of exploration has left far more questions than answers, and as big data moves into the mainstream we need heroes like Smolan and Nate Silver, the statistician who put big data in the spotlight after correctly predicting the 2012 presidential election winner in all 50 states.  So as big data comes into its own, the need to define big data becomes all the more urgent.

“I think a lot of people are starting to sense how unbelievably powerful--how important [big data] is to us,” Smolan said when I asked him why people have such a strong desire to define big data.  “We may be metahumans 50 years from now,” he goes on, hinting at the long-term consequences in hastening our speed of learning and technological advancements.

During my interview with Smolan he pondered the cultural and economic impact of the automobile, the revolutionizing technology of his grandfather’s era.  It later became clear that big data is Smolan’s generational game-changer, thrusting humanity forward in ways we’re only beginning to imagine.

Flipping through Smolan’s latest book, you’ll find that imagination plays a major role in big data’s story.  Smolan himself relied a great deal on imagination to fathom the very compilation of The Human Face of Big Data, and every anecdote featured in the book is sure to send your own imagination soaring.  A global conversation about big data is Smolan’s ultimate goal with this book, in conjunction with an interactive iPhone app that shows how you compare to the worldwide view of crime, relationships and religion.

Big Data eye candy: Why we need real pictures

While “big data” sounds nerdy, Smolan set out to make the topic as compelling and accessible as ever.  His years of photographing for TIME, National Geographic and Life have granted Smolan an amazing ability to connect with the public, always leveraging technology to tell its own story.  Big data, being a new way of capturing cultural snapshots, embodies a unique relationship Smolan’s developed between photography and the quantification of every thing.

“[Photographs] can convey so much information so quickly,” Smolan says of applying his photojournalistic skills to the topic of big data.  “The photographs are like the bait on the hook.  The whole topic is so off-putting--big data.  The pictures give an emotional response, so that’s the bait.  Then you get this really interesting story you normally wouldn't have read about.”

In his book, what you won’t find is a series of stories about the datacenter, or images of people sitting in front of their computers.  Instead you’ll see the histories underlying modern big data, pitting J. Edgar Hoover’s early FBI database against the surprisingly secure but controversial Wikileaks data center, or emphasizing human’s desire to discover patterns with a Dark Ages record book of the Black Plague.

There’s also the story of one man who fought to gain rightful access to real-time data being tracked by the manufacturers of his pacemaker, and the unnerving numbers that reveal the true patterns behind our social networking behavior, going so far as to create a digital footprint for a third of children in the U.S. before they’re even born.

What of big data, now that the cat’s out of the bag?

The human factor is probably the most important consideration in our effort to define big data, because data is in the process of becoming a commodity that the consumer should both give and receive.   Now that the business world is ready to put big data to work, consumers will have little choice but to pay attention to the subsequent products and services.

Smolan expects the term “big data” will become as innocuous as the “Internet,” branching out into subsets that are characterized by their context.  There are few other conclusions to reach when flipping through The Human Face of Big Data, unable to deny the countless ways in which data touches us in our everyday lives.

Big data isn’t something you can easily define, rather it’s the newest layer of scaffolding upon which we build communication channels, advertising methods and knowledge pools.  We’ve hardly begun to comprehend what big data will truly mean to us in the future, just as Smolan’s grandfather could never have predicted the global impact of the automobile when it first replaced the horse and buggy.