Saving Big Data from Big Mouths

SA Forum is an invited essay from experts on topical issues in science and technology. It has become fashionable to bad-mouth big data. In recent weeks the New York Times, Financial Times, Wired and other outlets have all run pieces bashing this new technological movement. To be fair, many of the critiques have a point: There has been a lot of hype about big data and it is important not to inflate our expectations about what it can do. But little of this hype has come from the actual people working with large data sets.