Reflections on ‘Encounters with Big Data’, our course in Cape Town
Posted: Sun Feb 09, 2025 3:49 am
Louise Corti, Director of Collections Development and Producer Relations at the UK Data Service, and Chris Park, Data Scientist, report back from the course, Encounters with Big Data: An Introduction to using Big Data in the Social Sciences, held in Cape Town, South Africa from 30 January to 3 February 2017.
The course met one of the objectives of the Smarter Household Energy Data project, a joint International Centre Partnership Grant between the UK Data Service and DataFirst and funded by the uk rcs data Economic and Social Research Council in the UK and the National Research Foundation in South Africa, to create a collaborative research infrastructure for large-scale household energy data. Louise Corti, one of the principal investigators told us: “This course introduced part of our work on ‘scaling up’ data curation and user access approaches for big data, predominantly where larger or more complex data sources – bigger than the 5GB maximum download bundle of survey data that our users typically access – or where computationally-intensive and iterative modelling is needed.”
The course covered aspects of extraction, exploration, and statistical analysis of big data behind the UK Data Service’s new Data Services as a Platform (DSaaP) initiative being developed in partnership with Hortonworks, a leader in Hadoop-based data technologies.
The course met one of the objectives of the Smarter Household Energy Data project, a joint International Centre Partnership Grant between the UK Data Service and DataFirst and funded by the uk rcs data Economic and Social Research Council in the UK and the National Research Foundation in South Africa, to create a collaborative research infrastructure for large-scale household energy data. Louise Corti, one of the principal investigators told us: “This course introduced part of our work on ‘scaling up’ data curation and user access approaches for big data, predominantly where larger or more complex data sources – bigger than the 5GB maximum download bundle of survey data that our users typically access – or where computationally-intensive and iterative modelling is needed.”
The course covered aspects of extraction, exploration, and statistical analysis of big data behind the UK Data Service’s new Data Services as a Platform (DSaaP) initiative being developed in partnership with Hortonworks, a leader in Hadoop-based data technologies.