Browsing by Subject "big data"
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Item Domestic Surveillance and Government's Loss of Legitimacy(2014-06-09) Inks, Christopher Scott; Inks, Christopher Scott; Phelps, James R; Phelps, James RThe terrorist attacks against the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001 created an environment ripe for the abuse of power. With a fearful nation clamoring for greater protection against future attacks, the National Security Administration (NSA) took the opportunity to create and implement a secret domestic spying and data mining program, the size of which had never before been imagined. Because information is the ultimate form of power in today’s world, unmitigated access to so much personal data has the potential to aggregate power into this one agency, leaving the rest of government and the populace unable to defend themselves against those who would use it to advance their own agendas. Once obtained, there is no way to check this power. Since government is only as legitimate as the populace believes it to be, such aggregations of power are likely to increase dissent among the citizenry and ultimately result in a belief that it has become illegitimate. Such a government is ineffective and puts the entirety of the populace in harm’s way, not only from terrorists outside its borders, but from potential domestic abuses of this power. In the rush to protect the country against terrorism, one must be careful the actions he or she takes do not inadvertently create a homeland security threat from within.Item Web Archives and Large-Scale Data: Perliminary Techniques for Facilitating Research(2012-05-25) Woodward, Nicholas; Norsworthy, Kent; Texas Advanced Computing Center; University of Texas at AustinThe Latin American Government Documents Archive (LAGDA) is a collaborative project of the University of Texas Libraries, The Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, and the Latin American Network Information Center (LANIC) at The University of Texas at Austin that seeks to preserve and facilitate access to a wide range of ministerial and presidential documents from 18 Latin American and Caribbean countries. Web crawling is conducted quarterly using the Internet Archive’s Archive-It application. The resulting Archive contains copies of the Websites of approximately 300 government ministries and presidencies between 2005 and the present. Currently, LAGDA is comprised of approximately 66.6 million documents archived from the Internet, totaling 5.6 terabytes of data. The collection increases in size by an additional 250 gigabytes with each quarterly crawl. Content in the Archive includes not only the full-text versions of official documents, but also original video and audio recordings of key regional leaders, all archived in the ARC file format produced by the Heritrix web crawler. Archive contents include thousands of annual and "state of the nation" reports, plans and programs, and speeches by presidents and government ministers. The data include HTML-formatted pages, Microsoft Word documents, Adobe PDF files and RTF documents, as well as various audio and video formats. The collection includes only sparsely populated metadata. Promoting research of the collection is a central component of the LAGDA project, and towards those ends staff has collaborated with researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) using the LAGDA data to develop text-mining methods for document representation and classification. This includes implementing several strategies to mechanically classify and categorize information contained in the Archive in order to facilitate search and browse capabilities. Additionally, LANIC and TACC have worked together to create methods for research on sub collections in the Archive, e.g. presidential speeches or ministerial documents. Preliminary results of these efforts have been encouraging, and they are the initial steps on the path towards solutions that will make large-scale data more accessible to researchers. The challenges presented in LAGDA are similar to those faced by academic libraries across the country as they are increasingly faced with “big data” collections that necessitate new strategies for data analysis tools. Nascent projects such as LAGDA provide some initial insights into how academic libraries can work collaboratively to facilitate research on the types of large-scale collections that are increasingly prevalent in today’s digital world. The presentation will focus on the following components: Challenges presented by Web archived data “Big data” and data-driven research The role of libraries in data analysis The future of “big data” and libraries