In this project, we were reconstructing the public news discourse on ‘big data’. Its background is the increased presence of big data in business, public service, higher education as well as in all other sorts of social arenas. ‘Big data’, it seems, has become a topic and a problem in media and academia. The project thus looked at how big data was framed in news reports as an effective though unfathomable socio-material fact presenting threats and chances to social well-being as well as to private and public security.
The project was funded by a grant from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). A German report about the project can be accessed from the website.