Founded in Seoul in 2019 and relocated to the University of Hong Kong in 2022, the Big Data Studies Lab (BDSL) conducts experimental research to prepare the humanities for the transformative changes occurring in the Zettabyte era. Our team addresses the challenges of handling sources distributed across multiple servers and engaging with digital artifacts such as audiovisual content, virtual worlds, and synthetic creations made with generative artificial intelligence. At the heart of BDSL’s mission is to update the digital humanities for Web 2.0 and beyond, especially in light of big data’s materiality known as the 3Vs: volume, velocity, and variety.
BDSL aspires to develop a global and balanced understanding of big data from a humanities perspective. Our international research team consults sources in English, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Danish, Norwegian, and other languages.
BDSL is committed to maintaining a high standard of research, with an emphasis on technological literacy and methodological rigor. Our objective is not hasty theorization but rather to empirically demonstrate our arguments through experiments and field research. We thoroughly verify all facts, reports, whitepapers, and data sets cited in our publications, and we promptly correct any errors or misleading information we discover.
