Big data and data analytics

Vast reams of data were being produced by new technologies such as social media platforms and smart city infrastructures. Urban geographer Rob Kitchin, was also beginning to pose similar questions with a focus on the emergence of Smart Cities. More recently, the epistemological debates around big data have drawn on feminist and decolonial lenses to illuminate some of the ways that historically constituted social injustices become embedded in the ‘universalist’ knowledge claims emerging from many big data systems. As Kitchin argued in his book The Data Revolution, “there is a need to develop conceptual and philosophical ways to make sense of data”. In 2014, when the book was published, there was a relatively limited conceptual apparatus through which to make sense of the emergence of big data and related analytics, but it was not long before scholars stepped into the space with a variety of conceptual tools that could be used to help illuminate what was unfolding.