The Information Professional

"Called "The Human Face of Big Data," (http://thehumanfaceofbigdata.com/) this is the latest project by longtime photojournalist Rick Smolan, the one-time National Geographic photographer who's best known for creating the "Day in the Life" series of books.
Smolan's approach for this work was the same as the one he's used for his main prior projects: He dispatched an small army -- in this case 100 photographers and 22 researchers going at it for a year and a half -- to capture and illustrate one topic. Big data is a tough one, for sure, not as visually obvious as, say, "The Obama Time Capsule," which chronicled Obama's first presidential run and his first 100 days in office.

Rick Smolan
(Credit: Techonomy)
Which is why Smolan needed some convincing. "It just sounded so fluffy," said Smolan, whom I met up with at this week's Techonomy conference in Tuscon, Ariz., where he presented some of the images and findings from the book.
Before taking on the project, Smolan asked all sorts of tech bigwigs to describe big data for him, including Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. But it was Marissa Mayer, now Yahoo's CEO, who talked about it in a way that made him to decide to do the book.