Rhetorical Analysis: Six Provocations For Big Data

In “Six Provocations for Big Data,” danah boyd and Kate Crawford confronts the issue of people lacking in the sense of importance of critically analyzing and interrogating the phenomenon, its assumptions, and biases of Big Data (757). The authors, coming from a respected position, seem to reach and target an academic audience because of their high use of jargon and numerous respectable sources gathered and placed in the text. Together they stress furthering individual’s minds to understand Big Data in an attempt to ensure the usage of information both ethically and effectively. Although they excel at the rhetoric of collecting relative sources and present the article in a logical form, the audience they are attempting to reach becomes too narrow, neglecting the appeal to pathos. Crawford and boyd give significant value to their rhetoric ideals such as ethos and logos. They …show more content…
Both boyd and Crawford did extensive quality research and data collecting making this piece trustworthy and dependable. Throughout the article, they quote many sources of highly honorable positions such as Melvin Kranzberg a historian, Lawrence Lessig an attorney, and Lev Manovich professor of Computer Science. Crawford and boyd provide a research project involving 1,700 Facebook users who are currently at the time attended college to examine how their interests and friends change over time (758). This appeals to ethos due to the fact that the study was conducted in 2006, five years prior to when “Six Provocations for Big Data” was written, and the research was conducted through Harvard University. Included in this article, which they presented to an academic audience, the “accountability to the field and to human subjects requires rigorous thinking about the ramification of Big Data,