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The Imperial Origins of Big Data
Asheesh Kapur Siddique— We live in a moment of massive transformation in the nature of information. In 2020, according to one report, users of the Internet created 64.2 zetabytes of... READ MORE
In 2020, according to one , users of the Internet created 64.2 zetabytes of data, a quantity greater than the “number of detectable stars in the cosmos,” a colossal increase whose origins can be traced to the emergence of the World Wide Web in 1993. The expansion of European polities overseas from the late fifteenth century onward saw governments massively scale up their use of paper—and confront the challenge of controlling its dissemination across thousands of miles of ocean and land. Just as we struggle to organize, search, and control our email boxes, text messages, and app notifications, so too did these early moderns confront the attendant challenges of developing practices of collection and storage to manage the resulting information overload.
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