Open data discussions
The political/social science/etc blog Crooked Timber is having a seminar on Open Data, which is highly recommended. In one of the posts, Steven Berlin Johnson writes about the mid-19th century efforts of William Farr to publish more information on causes of death, information later used by John Snow in attributing cholera to contaminated water.
He concludes:
Yes, information abundance meant that the newspapers lost their local advertising monopolies to Craigslist and Groupon, but it also means that the crucial data they used to have to unearth by hanging around City Hall for months is now available to anyone with a Web browser or an API key. We may well have fewer investigative journalists on the payroll of newspapers, but if we play our Open Data cards right, we might well end up with more investigations.
[Update: these are now all collected in a post and PDF and epub]
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Hopefully apropos: the NZ eResearch symposium is kicking off in Wellington next week. http://www.eresearch.org.nz 4th to 6th of July.
Not going to make it myself, but looks like a good programme including a lot of interest to open-, and big-, data types.
12 years ago