A suitably immense subject is the opening public programme
for the newly refurbished National Library building on Wellington ’s Molesworth Street .
The Library reopened to the public this week after a three
year closure to renovate and future-proof the building, which houses a vast
catalogue of the nation’s treasures, including the billion-dollar collections
of the Alexander Turnbull Library.
One of the many resources the public are being invited to
view in the revitalised building is ‘Big
Data – Changing Place
“‘Big Data’ is a technical term for referring to volumes of
data too large to be processed by a single system,” explains Richard. “Sixty
years ago, digital computers made data readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet
made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a
single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the
most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of
the human condition.
“Big Data is not just for big business,” says Richard. “It
is redefining our lives and the way we see the physical and social places
around us, ourselves and the wider universe.”
The exhibition features an interactive 3D digital landscape
that shows Thorndon in the1840s (recreated from actual paintings made at that
time) and projecting forward to what the area could look like 100 years from
now.
‘Big Data – Changing Place
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