The inconclusive data we're throwing away

Here’s what I mean: I work on something, it gets published to the web, I get paid. But so often it gets published and nobody reads it. The culprit? The World Wide Web is chaos. That’s kind of sad — and to me, that’s the definition of inefficiency.

Ever felt that frustration when you’re searching for something online and can’t find what you need? I did. So I worked on a project that tried to evolve information retrieval. I was fed up with how inefficient my research had become, even with Google. But what worried me more was discovering that this frustration is everywhere in academia: negative results get swept under the table and forgotten.

I spent two years on this project. Ultimately, it didn’t succeed. I don’t think the objectives were bad, but for now it’s been kept secret — that awesome project is on ice. I do everything in my power to at least repurpose my negative results into content.

This is one image I’ll explain in a coming post series, diving into the issue of information accessibility. We’re sitting on mountains of Big Data that nobody can actually use.

#NegativeResults #InformationOverload #ResearchMethodology #SearchInefficiency #DataChaos