Recent Critiques of Big Data: Small Bibliography

A collection of some recent critiques of Big Data. No attempt has been made to be comprehensive. Suggestions for additions should be sent to Ernest Davis at .

Full disclosure: I think I found one of these from a Facebook recommendation, and a few of these were found using Google search, but actually only a few. The vast majority came to my attention from periodicals, blogs, and newsletters I subscribe to, or word of mouth, plus following links.

General Critiques

• Matt Asay Gartner on Big Data: Everyone's Doing It, No One Knows Why readwrite.com September 18, 2013.
• danah boyd and Kate Crawford, Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological, and Scholarly Phenomenon, Information, Communication, and Society 15:5, 2012, 662-679.
• Kate Crawford, The Hidden Biases in Big Data, Harvard Business Review Blog, April 1, 2013.
• Kaiser Fung, Toward a more useful definition of Big Data, undated.
• Tim Harford, Big data: Are We Making a Big Mistake? Financial Times, March 28, 2014.
• John Horgan, So Far, Big Data is Small Potatoes , Scientific American blog, June 9, 2014.
• Matthew Jones, Data & Hubris, guest blog, Columbia Data Science Class, November 26, 2012.
• Gary Langer Growing Doubts about Big Data, ABC News, blog. April 8, 2014.
• Gary Marcus, Steamrolled by Big Data The New Yorker (online), April 3, 2013.
• Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, Eight (No, Nine!) Problems with Big Data Op-Ed, New York Times, April 7, 2014.
• Cathy O'Neil, The Bursting of the Big Data Bubble, mathbabe blog, September 20, 2013.
• S.P., Separating tweet from chaff, The Economist April 1, 2014.
• Megan Scudellari, Scientists Question the Big Price Tags of Big Data, Newsweek, July 24, 2014.

Social and legal critiques

• Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst, Big Data's Disparate Impact Social Science Research Network, October 19. 2014.
• Data and Society Research Institute, Data & Civil Rights: Why "Big Data" is a Civil Rights Issue, Conference, October 30, 2014.
• Yian Q. Mui, Little-known firms tracking data used in credit scores Washington Post, July 16, 2011.
• Cathy O'Neil, The Dark Matter of Big Data, "mathbabe" blog, June 25, 2014.
• Frank Pasquale, The Dark Market for Personal Data New York Times, October 17, 2014.
• Matt Petronzio, How One Woman Hid Her Pregnancy from Big Data, Includes a video of the "Theorizing Big Data" panel at Theorizing the Web, 2014.
• David Robinson, Harlan Yu, and Aaron Rieke, Robinson & Yu Civil Rights, Big Data, and our Algorithmic Future. Report, September, 2014.
• Room for Debate, Is Big Data Spreading Inequality? NY Times, August 6, 2014.
• Natasha Singer, Never Forgetting a Face, New York Times, May 17, 2004.
• Latanya Sweeney Discrimination in Online Ad Delivery, ACM Queue, 11:3 10-28, 2013.
• Matt Stroud, The minority report: Chicago's new police computer predicts crimes, but is it racist? The Verge Feb. 19, 2014.
• Zeynep Tufekci, Engineering the public: Big data, surveillance, and computational politics First Monday Vol. 19 No. 7, July 7, 2014.
• Zeynep Tufekci and Brayden King, We can't trust Uber, New York Times, December 8, 2014.
• Janet Vertesi, My experiment opting out of Big Data made me look like a criminal, Time Magazine, May 1, 2014.

Social Media

• Raviv Cohen and Derek Ruths, Classifying Political Orientation on Twitter: It's not Easy! Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 2013.
• Daniel Gayo-Avello, "I Wanted to Predict Elections with Twitter and all I got was this Lousy Paper": A Balanced Survey on Election Prediction using Twitter Data Unpublished arXiv paper.
• Daniel Gayo-Avello, No, You Cannot Predict Elections with Twitter, Internet Computing, IEEE vol 16 no. 6 (2012): 91-94.
• Langer Associates, Social Media and Public Opinion Briefing paper.
• Derek Ruths and Jürgen Pfeffer, Social media for large studies of behavior, Science, Vol. 346 No. 6213, pp. 1063-1064, November 2014.
• Grant Schoenebeck, Potential Networks, Contagious Communities, and Understanding Social Network Structure, 2013.
• Zeynep Tufekci, Big Questions for Social Media Big Data: Representativeness, Validity, and Other Methodological Pitfalls, Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media 2014, to appear.

Education

• Carol Burris, Principal uncovers flawed data in her state's official education reports Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2014
• Cathy O'Neil, Value-added model doesn't find bad teachers, causes administrators to cheat "mathbabe" blog, March 31, 2013.

Google Flu Trends

• David Auerbach, The Mystery of the Exploding Tongue: How Reliable is Google Flu Trends? March 19, 2014.
• Declan Butler, When Google got flu wrong: US outbreak foxes a leading web-based method for tracking seasonal flu., Nature, 494:7436, February 13, 2013.
• Kaiser Fung, Google Flu Trends Failure Shows Good Data > Big Data, Harvard Business Review Blog, March 25, 2014.
• Chris Gonsalves, Google flu trends and the future of Big Data CRN, March 31, 2014.
• David Lazer, Ryan Kennedy, Gary King, Alessandro Vespignani, The Parable of Google Flu: Traps in Big Data Analysis, Science, 343, March 14, 2014.
• John Naughton Google and the Flu: How Big Data Will Help Us Make Gigantic Mistakes The Guardian April 5, 2014.

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems --- And Create More by Luke Dormehl

• Luke Dormehl, Algorithms are great and all, but they can also ruin lives. (excerpt from book). Slate November 19, 2014.

Who's Bigger? by Steven Skiena and Charlew Ward

• Ernest Davis, Review of Who's Bigger? Where Historical Figures Really Rank by S. Skiena and C. Ward. SIAM News March 2014.
• Olivier Lecarme, Review of Who's Bigger? in Computing Reviews, #142146, April 8, 2014.
• Cass Sunstein, Statistically, Who's the Greatest Person in History? Why quants can't measure historic significance, The New Republic December 3, 2013

Citation counts and Impact Factors

• Bruce Alberts, Impact Factor Distortions , Science, 340 p. 787, May 17, 2013.
• Lior Pachter, To some a citation is worth $3 per year "Bits of DNA" blog, October 31, 2014.
• San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessent
• Per O Seglen, Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. , BMJ: British Medical Journal 314, no. 7079 (1997): 498.
• Per O Seglen, Citations and journal impact factor: Questionable indicators of research quality, Allergy 52:11, 1050-1056, 1997.
• Christiano Varin, Manuela Cattelan, and David Firth Statistical Modelling of Citation Exchange among Statistics Journals, arXiv preprint arXiv:1312.1794 (2013).

Social Physics: How Good Ideas Spread --- The Lessons from a New Science by Sandy Pentland

• William Butz, Stressing Patterns of Exchange, Science, 344:1097, June 6, 2014.
• Nicholas Carr, The Limits of Social Engineering April 16, 2014.
• Cathy O'Neil, No, Sandy Pentland, let's not optimize the status quo "mathbabe" blog, May 2, 2014.

Evidence-Based Sentencing

• Massimo Calabresi, Attorney General Eric Holder to Oppose Data-Driven Sentencing, Time Magazine, July 31, 2014
• Luis Daniel, The dangers of evidence-based sentencing mathbabe blog guest post, October 21, 2014.
• Sonja Starr, Sentencing by the Numbers New York Times Op-Ed, August 10, 2014.

White House Report

• Big Data: Seizing Opportunities, Preserving Values, Executive Office of the President, May 2014.
• Jessica McKenzie, Where the White House 'Big Data' Report Falls Short techpresident.com, May 6, 2014.
• Cathy O'Neil, Inside the Podesta Report: Civil Rights Principles of Big Data mathbabe blog, May 7, 2014.

The Signal and The Noise by Nate Silver

• Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, What Nate Silver Gets Wrong, New Yorker online, Jan. 25, 2013,
• Cathy O'Neil, Nate Silver confuses cause and effect, ends up defending corruption, mathbabe blog, December 20, 2012.

Dataclysm by Christian Rudder

• Cathy O'Neil Christian Rudder's Dataclysm mathbabe blog, September 16, 2014.

The Facebook Mood Manipulation Experiment

• James Grimmelman, The Facebook Emotional Manipulation Study: Sources The Laboratorium.

• Adam Chandler, The Many Reasons to Dislike Facebook's Mood Manipulation Experiment. The Wire, June 28, 2014
• Kate Crawford, The Test We Can --- and Should --- Run on Facebook, The Atlantic July 2, 2014.
• John Grohol,= Comments on Emotional Contagion on Facebook? More Like Bad Research Methods, psychcentral.com blog, June 28(?), 2014.
• Adam D.I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory. and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks, PNAS, vol. 111 no. 24, 2014, 8788-8790.
• Adrienne LaFrance, Even the Editor of Facebook's Mood Study Thought It Was Creepy The Atlantic Magazine June 28, 2014.
• Robinson Meyer, Everything We Know About Facebook's Secret Mood Manipulation Experiment , The Atlantic Magazine, June 28, 2014.
• Janet D. Stemwedel, Some thoughts about human subject research in the wake of Facebook's massive experiment, Scientific American blog, June 30, 2014.
• Zeynep Tufekci, Facebook and Engineering the Public, medium.com, June 29, 2014.
• Katy Waldman, Facebook's Unethical Experiment, , Slate, June 28, 2014

Social Media Manipulating Elections

• Micah Sifry, Why Facebook's "Voter Megaphone" is the Real Manipulation to Worry About, Personal Democracy Plus, July 3, 2014.
• Micah Sifry, Facebook Wants You to Vote on Tuesday. Here's How It Messed With Your Feed in 2012. Mother Jones, October 31, 2014.

Random

• Nick Bilton, Friends and Influence for Sale Online, New York Times, April 20, 2014.
• Mike Boehm, Google's wrong information about MOCA misleads museum-goers. Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2014.

Satire

• Google Nest