Australasian data practices: Mining, scraping, mapping, hacking

Our society has spent the past couple of decades rapidly digitising itself: migrating communication, commerce and culture into the network, and transforming everything it touches into data. The scale of “big data” is matched only by the hype that surrounds it. The Economist trumpeted the “data deluge” on their February 2010 cover: a businessman catches falling data in an upside-down umbrella, funnelling it to water a flower whose leaves are hundred dollar bills. Data has been called “the new oil”; fuel for the next boom, as the current one falls apart. We have every reason to be sceptical when big business and government sing its praises in unison, but for better or worse data is now tightly woven into our world. One of the key challenges for our culture at this point is to come to grips with data; to work with it, learn its language, question and apply it.