Big Data may be relatively new but data has been a hot topic of discussion for over a 100 years. Interesting to note, the challenges in fetching and understanding it remain fundamentally the same. We are told that this is the era of Big Data but its roots go back to 1914. Willard Brinton wrote the first book on communicating data, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts. He had stated that those who possessed cutting-edge data technologies would be the pioneers in their field. Processing and visual representation of data as information would allow us to give just the required information and facts to allow those who aren't proficient in data, actionable insights into their problems. In 100 years more, we would hopefully understand analytics and effective data visualization. Read more at: http://www.computerworld.com/article/2942728/big-data/big-data-the-100-year-old-buzzword.html

Big data can also be applied in the field of humanities specially history. With advancement in text analytics, historians can now go through a huge number of historical documents and discover patterns and trends from the past. These then can be used as evidence to check if theories are correct. Research students analyzed a huge number of novels using big data analytics which allowed them to leverage insight on what the semantics implied about the society. Given the nature of historical documents, it is difficult to digitalize and apply text analytics to those. Thus data analytics is being considered by historians now. Big data when applied to history will help bring information scattered over the world thus helping historians to gain insight and predict the future. Read more at: https://channels.theinnovationenterprise.com/articles/data-looking-at-the-past