Now wenches, listen, and let lovers lie: women's storytelling in Bloomfield and Clare

This essay involves two ‘borders’. The first is the border of gender, between male poet and female subject. The second is a cultural border, much criss-crossed in the early modern period, but still tricky for the nineteenth-century ‘labouring-class’ poets to negotiate: the border between oral and printed culture. If I do not on this occasion cross the river Tweed, I am nevertheless keenly aware here that John Clare’s ‘absent’ grandfather was an itinerant Scottish schoolmaster, and that Scotland itself in the period was, as Hamish Henderson reminds us, the very powerhouse of British balladry and folk culture

How does big data affect GDP? Theory and evidence for the UK

We present an economic approach to measuring the impact of Big Data on GDP and GDP growth. We define data, information, ideas and knowledge. We present a conceptual framework to understand and measure the production of “Big Data”, which we classify as transformed data and data-based knowledge. We use this framework to understand how current official datasets and concepts used by Statistics Offices might already measure Big Data in GDP, or might miss it. We also set out how unofficial data sources might be used to measure the contribution of data to GDP and present estimates on its contributions to growth. Using new estimates of employment and investment in Big Data as set out in Chebli, Goodridge et al. (2015) and Goodridge and Haskel (2015a) and treating transformed data and data-based knowledge as capital assets, we estimate that for the UK: (a) in 2012, “Big Data” assets add £1.6bn to market sector GVA; (b) in 2005-2012, account for 0.02% of growth in market sector value-added; (c) much Big Data activity is already captured in the official data on software – 76% of investment in Big Data is already included in official software investment, and 76% of the contribution of Big Data to GDP growth is also already in the software contribution; and (d) in the coming decade, data-based assets may contribute around 0.07% to 0.23% pa of annual growth on average