Gerhard Lauer kicked off this second and final day of "The public, the media and politics: intellectual debate and science in the age of digital communication" with a very interesting (albeit for scientists maybe not all that new) talk on the amounts of data being generated today. He listed the LHC and DNA sequencing as fields in which the data and not theory is driving the research (not quite sure if I agree entirely on the LHC, though).

He then went on and told us about new ways of analyzing social and linguistic data on the web, such as Truthy. Of course, these examples also covere the latest Google project in this direction, Culturomics. Clearly, the data deluge has arrived even in the humanties, in this case linguistics. Another example was to use EEG to train computers to classify images. His own research concerns 'comparative corpus narratology'. They use crowd annotations to find patterns of cultural evolution in novels.

In his final part he asked if we are really ready to share all our data: everybody supports open access and open data, but only a fraction of scientists are actually practicing it. He projected that the future is bright for ataintensive sciences and collaborative authorships using virtual research environments. This, he purports, is likely to lead to the demise of the idealistic concept of the intellectual in favor of the more pragmatic data intellectual. This matched really well the discussion that ended yesterday's program.