Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

My study interrogates the rhetorical implications of widespread applications of Big Data - a research method that deploys large-scale analytics to produce knowledge and predict or determine outcomes from massive, complex data sets. I argue that by approaching Big Data rhetorically, scholars in the humanities can become better equipped to interrogate and account for the affordances, promises, constraints, and perils of Big Data. Drawing on examples of Big Data as applied in politics, academia, and biotechnology, this paper shows how the cultural cachet of Big Data research has empowered data analytic companies to sell their services as resources for revealing otherwise inaccessible truths about people and populations, despite obvious gaps in methodological regulation, demographic representation, and data quality. Big Data is rhetorically successful, I argue, because it removes sites of accountability while at the same time claiming to be a means of establishing accountability. Like many technological innovations that have come before it, Big Data often perpetuates existing social inequalities and reinforces partisanship; however, because the term “Big Data” increasingly connotes scientific credibility, arguments made using large-scale data analytics can, intentionally or unintentionally, inscribe in hegemonic structures a sense of objectivity. To disrupt the power of large-scale data analytics, I offer a rhetorical framework for approaching Big Data research ethically by emphasizing accountability and transparency. Finally, I call for researchers in the humanities to actively and publicly account for the production, development, and use of data analytic technologies and methods that drive Big Data research.