Big Data Versus Small Data: The Case of ‘Gripe’ (Flu) in Spanish

Big data is a broad term for data sets so large and complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. A new field, Predictive Analytics, is trying to extract value from those big (unstructured) data. In Corpus Linguistics, researchers usually deal with small data. In this paper, we compare the amount and the quality of information with respect to a single topic (flu) in Twitter and in MultiMedica (a corpus of medicine texts).