"Big Data", What it Looks Like to Compute on the Entire Planet
Join ASU Libraries on March 15th for "Quantifying, Visualizing, and Forecasting Global Human Society Through 'Big Data': What it Looks Like To Compute on the Entire Planet," featuring Kalev H. Leetaru Founder, GDELT Project (http://gdeltproject.org/)
Senior Fellow, George Washington University, USA.
Presentation description: What happens when massive computing power brings together an ever-growing cross-section of the world’s information in real-time, from news media to social media, books to academic literature, the world’s libraries to the web itself, machine translates all of that material as it arrives, and applies a vast array of algorithms to identify the events and emotions, actors and narratives and their myriad connections that define the planet to create a living silicon replica of global society? The GDELT Project (http://gdeltproject.org/), supported by Google Ideas, is the largest open data initiative in the world focusing on cataloging and modeling global human society, offering a first glimpse at what this emerging “big data” understanding of society looks like.
Operating the largest open deployments of streaming machine translation, sentiment analysis, global geocoding, and event identification, coupled with perhaps the world’s largest program to catalog local media, the GDELT Project monitors worldwide news media, emphasizing small local outlets, live machine translating all coverage it monitors in 65 languages, flagging mentions of people and organizations, cataloging relevant imagery, video and social posts, converting textual mentions of location to mappable geographic coordinates, identifying millions of themes and thousands of emotions, extracting over 300 categories of physical events, and making all of this available in a free open data firehose of human society. This is coupled with a massive socio-cultural contextualization dataset codified from more than 21 billion words of academic literature spanning most unclassified US Government publications, the open web, and more than 2,200 journals representing the majority of humanities and social sciences research on Africa and the Middle East over the last half century.
Used by governments, NGOs, scholars, journalists and ordinary citizens across the world to identify breaking situations, map evolving conflicts, model the undercurrents of unrest, explore the flow of ideas and narratives across borders, and even forecast future unrest, the GDELT Project constructs a real-time global catalog of behavior and beliefs across every country, connecting the world’s information into a single massive ever-evolving real-time network capturing what's happening around the world, what its context is and who's involved and how the world is feeling about it, every single day. Here’s what it looks like to conduct data analytics at a truly planetary scale and the incredible new insights we gain about the daily heartbeat of our global world.