Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 189

with practical consequences. For example, a United Nations agency sup-
ports big-data research on how organizations respond to humanitarian
crises. The data include social-media content with the goal of creating
recommendations on what works best (Burn-Murdoch 2012). Similarly,
in Sierra Leone, the mapping company Esri provides software and a cloud
portal that reveals where health clinics are needed (A. Schwarz 2013). Data
scientists working with the London-based organization DataKind provide
advice to charities about how to deal with problems in the nonproit sec-
tor. Furthermore, researchers associated with Toronto's Hospital for Sick
Children have used big data to develop algorithms that anticipate infections
in premature babies. Notwithstanding these beneits, because similar types
of algorithms can be used by insurance companies to refuse coverage or by
social-media companies to manipulate “trending” results, there are more
than a few worries about ethical and political issues (Burn-Murdoch 2012;
Gillespie 2013). This has led some data scientists to promote a code of
good behavior, “Doing Good with Analytics,” that commits to assessing
the ethical value of research before the process begins and to using it to
bring about positive social change (D. Ross 2012). It has also prompted
calls to democratize data science by making the new ield more open and
accessible to citizens (Harris 2013b).
Since private corporations control most of the research using big data,
concerns have been raised about access to data because irms are reluctant
to follow traditional social-science protocols for releasing evidence reported
on in academic papers. The issue came to a head in 2012 when researchers
with Google and Cambridge University refused to make available data
for a conference paper on the popularity of YouTube in several countries.
The chairman of the conference, a physicist who heads a social-science
research group at HP, responded angrily and recommended that the
conference should no longer accept papers from researchers who, whether
for a commercial, security, or any other reason, refuse to share data. He
followed that up with a letter to the prestigious science journal Nature
declaring that big-data analysis, which was supposed to expand research
horizons, is actually narrowing them because the private companies that
own the data refuse to release it (Markoff 2012). On the other hand, a
growing number of critical social-science scholars are developing tools to
use commercial software and data generated by social media to advance
alternative visions of society (Beer 2012).