This section reports the results of corpus extraction, TM model fitting and selection, gathering and consolitation of big data definitions, and annotation of topics with the themes.
The last decade was like the Wild West of big data gathering and analysis, as every consumer-facing company joined the gold rush to absorb the minutiae of their customers' lives and exploit the data's powerful potential, all with little inquiry or oversight.
It is counter-intuitive to the "collect it all" mentality, yet whistleblowers, even before Edward Snowden, have been trying to make the public aware of the problems that inherently undercut the meaningfulness of "big data" gathering and analysis.
Multivariate graphs didn't begin to appear in the popular press until the nineteen-eighties, and only in the past decade, as smartphones and other information-gathering devices have accelerated the accumulation of Big Data, have complex visualizations been routinely presented to the general public.
And while increasing the length of the data will improve your predictions, the full power of big data comes from gathering wide data.
"Although the report may have been silent on government use of big data for intelligence gathering, we won't be," the Electronic Frontier Foundation vowed in a blog post.
For example, IBM's Watson Health Cloud is gathering the health records of more than 50 million people in a secure cloud hub, thus demonstrating the potential of "big data".
Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall complained on July 2nd that officials "are not always accurate" in their characterisations of big data-gathering programmes.That said, the material published by Mr Snowden suggests that the NSA's procedures regarding Americans' data are careful and bureaucratic: a retired foreign spook calls them "meticulous".
Finally we present the gathering and summary of existing big data definitions, and the process used to identify them in the topics determined by TM.
