On the Origin(s) and Development of the Term “Big Data"

Francis Diebold

PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania

Abstract: I investigate the origins of the now-ubiquitous term †Big Data," in industry and academics, in computer science and statistics/econometrics. Credit for coining the term must be shared. In particular, John Mashey and others at Silicon Graphics produced highly relevant (unpublished, non-academic) work in the mid-1990s. The first significant academic references (independent of each other and of Silicon Graphics) appear to be Weiss and Indurkhya (1998) in computer science and Diebold (2000) in statistics /econometrics. Douglas Laney of Gartner also produced insightful work (again unpublished and non-academic) slightly later. Big Data the term is now firmly entrenched, Big Data the phenomenon continues unabated, and Big Data the discipline is emerging.

Keywords: Massive data; computing; statistics; econometrics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 7 pages
Date: 2012-09-21
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/sites/default/files/filevault/12-037.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pen:papers:12-037

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Administrator ().