Metrics for the Expanding Digital Universe

As a self-professed data junkie, I always thoroughly enjoy the yearly Internet Trends presentation from Mary Meeker from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

One slide that jumped out talks about the very small percentage of data that is “tagged” and the even smaller amount of data that is “analyzed” in the Digital Universe.

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(See all the slides here.)

These percentages hold true with what we have seen at Plum Analytics when looking at the data exhaust surrounding scholarly research output.  Although we cannot yet gather metrics for ALL output, we are increasingly able to quantify the engagement around an ever-growing set.

Working with our partners and customers, we continue to make progress on tagging and building analytics and dashboards for curated subsets of the world’s scholarly data.

Drilling into the stat of why only 1% of the data in the digital universe is analyzed, it’s illustrative to think about just how fast this universe of data is expanding.  Below is a real time infographic that shows this expansion really well.

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Note that the above image is just a sample of the data at PennyStocks.la.

At Plum Analytics, we’re excited to think about the opportunities of harvesting the firehose of data surrounding scholarly output, and utilizing it to tell the great stories of the impact that researchers are having.