Recent Critiques of Big Data: Small Bibliography
A collection of some critiques of Big Data by
Ernest Davis.
The bibliography is entirely out of date. When I created it in 2014, it was
fairly thorough, but soon after the subject took off, and in mid-2015
I gave up trying to maintain it. At this point (2018) an adequate bibliography
would probably contain dozens of books and thousands of articles.
Full disclosure: I think I found one or two
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; pieces that friends had "shared" on Facebook;
or word of mouth, plus following links.
Reviews of
Weapons of Math Destuction.
Must reading on the subject.
Web sites
Another Bibliography
Toward ethical, transparent,
and fair AI/ML: A critical reading list. Eirini Malliaraki.
General Critiques
- AAPOR (American Association for Public Opinion Research)
AAPOR Report on Big Data, Feb. 12, 2015.
Summary of recommendations by Cathy O'Neil, mathbabe blog, Feb. 18, 2015
-
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.
-
Morris Hartz
How Big Data is Unfair, Sept. 26, 2014.
-
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.
- Claire Cain Miller,
Algorithms and Bias: Q. and A. with Cynthia Dwork
New York Times August 10, 2015.
- Mark Moritz,
Big Data's "Streetlight Effect": Where and How We Look Affects what We See
, The Conversation, May 17, 2016.
- Cathy O'Neil,
The Bursting of the Big Data Bubble, mathbabe blog, September 20, 2013.
- Cathy O'Neil
Big Data is the New Phrenology mathbabe blog, February 26, 2015.
- Cathy O'Neil
Four political camps in the big data world, mathbabe blog,
April 22, 2015
- 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.
- Hannah Wallach
Big Data, Machine Learning, and the Social Sciences: Fairness, Accountability
and Transparency.
Invited talk at NIPS 2015.
Social and legal critiques
- David Auerbach,
You are what you click: On microtargeting,
The Nation March 4, 2013.
- Solon Barocas and Andrew Selbst,
Big Data's Disparate Impact
Social Science Research Network, October 19. 2014.
- T. Blanke, G. Greenway, J. Pybus and M. Coté,
Mining Mobile Youth
Cultures,
2nd IEEE International Conference on Big Data, Washington,2014.
-
Data and Society Research Institute,
Data & Civil Rights: Why "Big Data" is a Civil Rights Issue,
Conference, October 30, 2014.
- Virginia Eubanks,
The Policy Machine: The dangers of letting algorithms make decisions in law
enforcement, welfare, and child protection.
Slate, April 30, 2015.
- Rose Hackman,
Is online surveillance of black teenagers the new stop-and-frisk?
- Yian Q. Mui,
Little-known firms tracking data used in credit scores
Washington Post, July 16, 2011.
- Nathan Newman,
Google, Ebay, Amazon, and Yahoo! Team Up to Gut Consumer and
Privacy Laws, Data Justice block, April 27, 2015.
- Fokke Obbema et al.
China Rates its own Citizens, Including Online Behavior
die Volkskraant, April 25, 2015.
- 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.
- Don Peck,
They're Watching You At Work. Atlantic Monthly
November 20, 2013.
- 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.
- Nicholas Terry,
Big Data Proxies and Health Privacy Exceptionalism .
- 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.
-
Kaveh Waddell,
How Big Data Harms Poor Communities, The Atlantic, April 8, 2016
Predictive Policing
-
M. Harris,
How Peter Thiel's Secretive Data Company Pushed into Policing,
Wired , August 9, 2017.
- Cathy O'Neil,
The Police State is already here,
mathbabe blog, April 27, 2015,
- Matt Stroud,
The minority report: Chicago's new police computer predicts crimes, but is
it racist?
The Verge Feb. 19, 2014.
-
P. Waldman, L. Chapman, and J. Robertson,
Palantir Knows Everything About You,
Bloomberg Business Week, April 19, 2018.
-
A. Winston,
Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive
policing technology, The Verge, Feb. 27, 2018.
-
A. Winston,
New Orleans ends its Palantir predictive policing program
The Verge, March 15, 2018.
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.
Breaking Privacy and Merchandising Private Information
-
Wolfie Christl,
Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life, Report, June 2017.
Full Report
- C. Dewey,
Creepy startup will help landlords, employers and online dates strip-mine
intimate data from your Facebook page
Washington Post, June 9, 2016.
-
E. Horvitz and D. Mulligan,
Data, privacy, and the greater good,
Science, 345(6245), 17 July 2015, 253-255.
-
A. Narayanan and V. Shmatikov.
Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets
Security and Privacy, 2008.
-
M. Kosinski, D. Stillwell, and T. Graepel,
Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of
human behavior. PNAS 2013.
-
L. Sweeney, A. Abu, J. Winn,
Identifying Participants in the Personal Genome Project by Name
SSRN 2013.
Education
-
Carol Burris,
Principal uncovers flawed data in her state's official education reports
Washington Post, Nov. 22, 2014
- Farai Chideya,
No Child Left Un-mined? Student Privacy at Risk in the Age of Big Data
The Intercept, June 27, 2015.
- Cathy O'Neil,
Value-added model doesn't find bad teachers, causes administrators to cheat
"mathbabe" blog, March 31, 2013.
Hiring
Science and Big Data
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.
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).
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.
-
Eileen Sullivan and Ronnie Greene,
States predict inmates' future crimes with secretive surveys,
AP, February 24, 2015.
White House Report
The Facebook Mood Manipulation Experiment
This has generated an immense literature of responses in a very short time.
A very extensive bibliography is here:
I list below only a comparative few that I read and thought interesting.
-
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
Election Manipulation
Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook
-
Eszter Hargittai,
Why doesn't Science publish important methods info prominently?
crookedtimber.org, May 7, 2015.
-
Nathan Jurgenson,
Facebook: Fair and Balanced Cyborgology May 7, 2015.
-
Christian Sandvig,
The Facebook "It's not our Fault" Study, Social Media Collective,
May 7, 2015.
-
Zeynep Tufekci,
How Facebook's Algorithm Suppresses Content Diversity (Modestely) and How
the Newsfeed Rules Your Clicks, medium.com, May 7, 2015.
Health Surveillance
Workplace Surveillance
-
Rebecca Greenfield,
Say Goodbye to your Desk, Bloomberg News, June 28,
2017
-
John Harris,
They call it fun, but the digital giants
are turning workers into robots, The Guardian, Jan. 20, 2017.
-
Sarah O'Connor,
Wearables at work: the new frontier of employee surveillance
Fiancial Times, June 8, 2015
Book Reviews
The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems --- And
Create More by Luke Dormehl
Dataclysm by Christian Rudder
An extremely fine book. Also, there is a wealth of
further references in the footnotes.
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.
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.
Who's Bigger? by Steven Skiena and Charlew Ward
Random
Satire