Although a Google Ngram like that in Chapter 14 (Exhibit 14.11) provides a quick way to discover the potential for Big Data, getting all that data ready for analysis involves a lot of hard work behind the scenes.  Research conducted for a recent New York Times article estimates that this “janitor work” takes between 50% and 80% of the time of the data scientists who work with Big Data.

As with every form of social science data, good quality datasets don’t just “happen”!