Georgetown Law Library presents Big Data and Big Challenges for Law and Legal Information: A Symposium in Celebration of 125 Years. It was scheduled for yesterday, Oct. 29, 2012, but has been postponed because of the storm on the East Coast. Check the conference web page or the Georgetown Law Library blog in the days to come for information on a rescheduled event.
“Big data” is a term perhaps too narrow for the topic: the size of data sets is not the key to big data issues. Rather, society is changing because of our growing ability to discover meaning by connecting points of information electronically, across multiple, often unrelated, sources. When thinking of quantitative decision making, big data may include “small data, but lots of it.”
This conference will examine the public good and collective harms that follow from the large-scale aggregation of information from public and private sources. During the course of the day, panelists will also examine how scholars, researchers, and information professionals manage very large or complex data sets to distill meaning and develop public policy.
mw
