Mining libraries: Lessons learned from 20 years of massive computing on the world's information

摘要

Over the course of the last two decades I have explored the informational undercurrents of the world's information and the potential of mass data mining of libraries through a myriad of lenses, both technical and methodological. From founding my first Internet startup twenty years ago as an eighth grade middle school student, to running one of the world's largest global monitoring platforms today, my work has debuted a myriad of new datasets, methodologies, and scales to the study of how we understand our global world. A central theme of that work has been around how creative "reimagining" of information through the emerging world of massive computing power can offer powerful and unexpected new lenses onto the world around us, and the incredible future that awaits as libraries transition from being museums of artifacts to becoming conveners of information and innovation that empower a new era of access and understanding of our world. This paper offers a unique detailed view of what it looks like deep in the trenches of the data revolution, surveying a selection of my projects over the last two decades and the lessons they offer libraries and publishers moving forward into our data-driven future.