MacroData and MicroData

Noted on Big and Small data, and why we aren’t following micro/macro naming conventions?

In my view Micro Data tells us about the minutiae of life, the plot of an ant, a single twitter user, a packets route to a remote server. Micro gives us a story from a specific POV, and the context is often implicit and visible. Compare to a Microhistory: “Microhistory is the intensive historical investigation of a well defined smaller unit of research (most often a single event, the community of a village, a family or a person). In its ambition, however, microhistory can be distinguished from a simple case study insofar as microhistory aspires to “[ask] large questions in small places”, to use the definition given by Charles Joyner.[1]“

Macro Data can provide us with an overview effect, it is often this that the data visualisers and data journalists are looking for – broad generalisations, and statistical analyses of vast data sets to detect patterns.

To compare: Macro-history (also known as Big History): “Macro-historical analysis seeks out large, long-term trends in world history, searching for ultimate patterns through a comparison of proximate details. […] Macro-historical studies often “assume that macro-historical processes repeat themselves in explainable and understandable ways”.[1]“

“Macrohistory is the study of the histories of social systems, along separate trajectories, through space and time, in search of patterns, even laws of social change.  Macrohistory is thus nomothetic and diachronic.  Macrohistorians — those who write macrohistory — are to the the historian what an Einstein is to the run-of-the-mill physicist: in search of the totality of space and time, social or physical. Macrohistorians use the detailed data of historians for their grand theories of individual, social and civilizational change.”
src: http://www.metafuture.org/Articles/MacrohistoryandtheFuture.htm