Why big data is a big deal

March 10, 2015

Scientists and scholars are creating more content than ever – and vastly greater collections of information are the subject of science as scholarship. At the same time, the community of users for and uses of this information are changing.

Micah Altman will discuss these trends in a talk entitled “Scholarly Communications in the Age of Big Data – 
Rules of Practical Information Economics” Friday, March 13, at 11 a.m. in the Marston Science Library, L136. The event will besponsored by the George A. Smathers Libraries.

Altman is director of research and head/scientist of the Program on Information Science for the MIT Libraries, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He will address the generation and use of durable information assets in scholarship and science, and the importance of understanding the changing relationship between consumers, purchasers and funders.

Prior to arriving at MIT, Altman served at Harvard University for 15 years as the associate director of the Harvard-MIT Data Center, archival director of the Henry A. Murray Archive and senior research scientist in the Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences. He is also a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution.

Altman conducts research in social science, information science and research methods – focusing on the intersections of information, technology, privacy and politics; and on the dissemination, preservation, reliability and governance of scientific knowledge.

To learn more about this event, please contact Barbara Hood, director of communications, George A. Smathers Libraries, at (352) 273-2505 or bhood@ufl.edu.

More information about the speaker is available at http://micahaltman.com/.