If you've ever had trouble explaining the concept of "big data" to someone—or had trouble wrapping your brain around the buzzword yourself—Rick Smolan wants to help. But how do you demonstrate big data? It's the somewhat abstract, powerful analytical processing of massive quantities of human- and machine-generated data. Smolan believes he can help people understand the idea with his new multimedia effort "The Human Face of Big Data," a week-long, mobile-app project which seeks to transform millions of smartphone users into voluntary sensors who will then "measure the world."
Smolan is a former National Geographic photojournalist, and his company, Against All Odds Productions, is a driving force behind the project. He may be uniquely qualified for this task due to his long track record of tackling monstrously large topics with large teams. In March 1981, he self-published A Day in the Life of Australia, a 24-hour photographic portrait of Australia by 100 photojournalists. In February of 1996, Smolan took on the Internet with 24 Hours in Cyberspace. The book, Web, and CD-ROM project (funded largely by tech companies) combined the participation of people across the Internet with the efforts of Web designers, editors, software developers, and 150 photojournalists.
Since then, Smolan has continued tackling weighty topics (for instance the global water crisis). But he told Ars the phenomenon of big data was "the most challenging and most exciting" topic he has investigated. "Big data is going to have an even greater impact than the Internet itself," he said, in terms of its potential impact on people's lives.
Part awareness-raising project, part publicity stunt, the app is tied to a large-format book and iPad interactive e-book (due in November). The app itself will be available for download starting September 26, and will "allow people around the world to compare and share their lives over the course of a week." Ideally, Smolan said, it will expose participants to how much information they are already sharing passively through their phones and other devices—information that companies are profiting from.
Most people are unaware of how much information is being collected from them and how it's used, Smolan said. "I was totally unaware I was transmitting data all the time from my phone. And nothing suggested that when I was searching for things on Google, I was putting data back in as well. If you asked someone 10 years ago, 'Would you let them plant a tracking device on you to track you everywhere you go?' You'd say 'no way'—but today, we're doing it voluntarily without even thinking about it."
The application will allow iOS and Android smartphone users to participate actively by answering survey questions and passively through data collected from the phone's GPS and other sensors. "We can capture the passive data off your phone—how far you move, how fast, etc.," Smolan said, "We can show that people in Sydney travel, on average, a certain number of miles a day."
The resulting data set will be able to be filtered by a variety of demographic settings, and will be analyzed by a collection of data scientists at the project's "Mission Control." "The Human Face of Big Data" will then conclude with an invitation-only event in New York City on October 2. Smolan said the data will ultimately be made available publicly and donated to researchers.
The book and e-book will be a more familiar project for Smolan. Containing photos and stories collected by over 100 photojournalists in 30 countries, they highlight individuals who have made discoveries by analyzing large quantities of data, as well as people with tales of the dark side of the technology. The anecdotes even include a bit on the "ring of steel"—the surveillance system with over 3,000 cameras used around lower Manhattan—and information on surveillance systems in London that inspired Jonathan Nolan's development of Person of Interest.
There's also a comparison between the faces of the pre-Internet world of more secretive, controlled "big data" and the post-Wikileaks world. "We found a photograph of the old FBI filing system from the 50s," Smolan said, "Then we found a picture of Julian Assange's (Wikileaks) data center in Sweden." Smolan says they look remarkably similar, but "the FBI filing system was much more secure back when you couldn't walk out with it on a thumbdrive."
Perhaps the final touch of the project's journalism-meets-stunt nature is how the book will be initially distributed. In an effort to maximize its impact, Smolan says it will be delivered to a list of the "10,000 most influential people around the world" on November 20. The whole project was underwritten by EMC (though Smolan says that the company has "never seen the book or the app" and has had no editorial input). To further counteract any corporate influence, the project will donate a dollar from each app download (for the first 50,000 downloads) to charity:water, a nonprofit funding safe drinking water projects in developing countries.