Big Data and Human Culture Blog Assignment

This blog should be completed and posted before you come to class on January 20th.

In class, we discussed some of the ways that our every-day actions are already connected to big data. Your assignment for this blog post (400-500 words or media equivalent) is to track a day in the life of your data. Choose one day between now and the next time we meet, and keep track using a notebook or your cell phone of every action that you take which could feasibly be included in a big database. Consider the following example:

After doing this for an entire day, you should post about the following:

1. Summarize the contributions you believe you made to big data for the day.
2. What does this contribution say about who “you” are?
3. Do you feel that it would be feasible to opt-out of your inclusion in big data?
4. Generate what Dan Geer calls a Tomorrow Question (see Terms of Service reading).
5. Please make sure you comment substantially on at least two other posts.

Consider the following example, both as a way to think about how you use data, but also as a way of presenting your results:

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[If you are considering expanding this post into your longer final post for HASTAC, you could try to go an entire day without contributing any of your data to a database, and blog about the challenges this presents.]