Abstract

This essay offers five conceptual entry points for engaging with Big Data from a rhetorical perspective. These five concepts—data in/as relationships, observability/action, patterns, diachronicity, and audience—serve as points of deep conceptual commonality between definitions of Big Data and principles in rhetorical studies, and are offered here as considerations for critiquing uses of Big Data from a rhetorical-humanistic perspective, as well as for guiding rhetorical work that uses Big Data.