Quote of the day

On or around June 6, 2013, it became impossible to consider writing about harnessing the power of Big Data for the humanistic enterprise without contemplating its power for more distinctly inhuman enterprises. Of course, the two have gotten conflated — suddenly people who'd never before heard of metadata are frightened by it, without knowing much about the more useful and benevolent purposes to which metadata can be put — but what the PRISM leaks have made clear is that computational approaches to understanding vast quantities of information have the potential to disrupt and transform our understanding of the culture in which we live.---Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Ends of Big Data