“Digital footprints” is an attractive, useful, and increasingly popular metaphor for thinking about Big Data. In this essay, I elaborate on this metaphor to highlight three relatively basic fallacies in the way we tend to think about Big Data: first, that they contain information on complete populations, or “ N = all”; second, that they contain recordings of naturalistic behavior; and third, that they can be understood devoid of context.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 48 citations exist upstream.
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