Data flows through streams ...

Idle Words > Talks > Haunted By Data


This is the text version of a talk I gave on October 1, 2015, at the Strata+Hadoop [Big Data Conference] World conference in New York City. The video version is here ytube (20 mins).

In preparing this talk I decided to check out the data landscape, since I hadn't seen it for a while.

The terminology around Big Data is surprisingly bucolic. Data flows through streams into the data lake, or else it's captured in logs. A data silo stands down by the old data warehouse, where granddaddy used to sling bits.

And high above it all floats the Cloud. Then this stuff presumably flows into the digital ocean.

 I would like to challenge this picture, and ask you to imagine data not as a pristine resource, but as a waste product, a bunch of radioactive, toxic sludge that we don’t know how to handle.