Lev Manovich’s article “Trending: The Promises and Challenges of Big Social Data” discusses the emergence of vast amounts of data that may soon be available to researchers in the humanities field.  In particular, he addresses the problems and complications which could arise with this data, one of which was particularly interesting to me.

Although social media sites will soon prove to be a great resource in terms of data for the humanities, Manovich urges that we must be careful when interpreting this data.  While it does allow for a much larger sample population than many past studies, social media information is largely biased and in many cases does not represent the actual thoughts and emotions of the people posting it.  While some users may be posting their real thoughts and feelings, others may post only things that their friends want to see, or will refrain from posting things that they think do not fit the social norm or which they might be judged for.  I know that I myself would be an example of this case; there are many times when I do not post things on social media sites that I feel like my friends would not want to hear about.

This point of his article made me realize just how different the data used in the humanities is from the data used by sciences.  The large amount of data that can be obtained from social media sites can almost all be biased in one way or another, whether a person is simply posting a status that is different from how they really feel, or taking pictures that only portray a more positive image of themselves.  The data used in science, on the other hand, can be thoroughly researched and proven to be true.  Although this may have been an obvious difference to some, I had never before considered the possibility of researching vast amounts of social data in the humanities field that is taken from people’s personal profiles, rather than from facts collected by the government.  When data from social media is analyzed, it seems to me that it should be read more as trends of what other people want to make their peers think about them.  While it could be used to analyze social trends, I believe these vast amounts of emerging social data should also be analyzed carefully, and taken with a grain of salt.