Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 224

announce a distinction between signal and noise because they are both
ambiguous and relative to the subjective expectations of those connected
to the communication network. Just as modern physics challenges the exis-
tence of an independent observer operating outside the system under study,
meaning that relativity is universal, no one, neither the novelist nor the data
analyst, resides outside the social network of human actors. Information
sources can also be destinations, transmitters can simultaneously receive,
and what is noise for some is sweet music or effective communication for
others. Moreover, writers and researchers are also communicators with
stakes in the objects under their particular microscopes.
Finally, there is the medium of interpretation itself, demonstrated by
the stark difference between Cloud Atlas the novel and Cloud Atlas the
ilm. One does not have to travel as far down the deterministic road as
McLuhan did to agree that the medium, whether it is a novel, ilm, or
research report, has an impact on the message communicated. The novel
creates room for complexity, nuance, and the reader's imagination that
ilm, however visually stunning, is more challenged to replicate. The
research report provides a concise snapshot of enormous quantities of
data that neither the novel nor the ilm can match. But in doing so, the
report makes assumptions about deinitions and choices and, more often
than not, pays the price for its concision by repressing the complexity
and subjectivity of the objects under study. Nor does the report take into
account the complexity of its formation—speciically how, as the science
scholar Bruno Latour (2009) has demonstrated, the scientiic process
makes its way to completion through multiple modes of expression and
representation.
At the very least, Mitchell's atlas of clouds reminds us that there are
legitimate alternative ways of knowing and of communicating knowledge
alongside those enshrined in clouds of big data accessed through digital
positivism. However, the latter is increasingly crowding out the former as
advances in computational capability and data analysis are applied to more
of what used to be the humanities and the social sciences. The spread of
the digital humanities, their access to funding, and their support from
university leaders who desperately need the resources that big data in the
humanities can attract make it more dificult for those who defend the
kind of detailed, qualitative understandings that humanities scholars have
deployed for centuries.