3 ms·

This is like saying that a spreadsheet with 26 columns and 1000 rows is big data, because it's larger than the budget of a city. It's really not big until you

• dredmorbius 8y ago
  "Big" doesn't strictly refer to informaion technology contexts. User / usage context also matters. For text, a byte is (roughly) a letter, 8 bytes about a word, 32 - 64 bytes a typical sentence, 140 bytes a tweet, 500 bytes the text that will fit on an index card, and 2.4 kB about a page of text (40 lines of 60 characters, about 250 words). Ten pages is a mid-length essay (25 kB, 2500 words), 100 pages a monograph or short novel (250 kB, 25,000 words), and 1,000 pages a sizeable book (2.5 MB, 250,000 words). As we extend from there, we're talking about shelves, aisles, floors, and libraries worth of content. My initial "5 MB is about a book" coment comes from experience with formatted textual (rather than graphical/raster) PDFs of books. The sum total of published human writing is modest by present data standards. The 24 million books of the U.S. Library of Congress, as extual PDFs, would occupy less than 120 TB of storage, about $6,000 at current prices. Reading that -- by humans, not machines -- might keep you up a few nights. When writing large literary works, the problems are far less with tthe computing than the authoring: developing and expressing ideas clearly, consistently, and effectively. The constraints on writing tools are imposed by wetware and cranial hardware, not silicon and software.