The envelope arrived a few days ago. Happy to see that my data loggers from the North Carolina State project known as Your Wild Life arrived. They are tiny metal cylinders, but powerful in their own way. For those of you who don’t know much about citizen science, I’m a volunteer helping gather data for a lab run by Rob Dunn, a biologist and writer. I was lucky enough to meet Rob and hear a lecture from him during the NASW conference in 2012.

Meeting Rob and hearing him discuss the microbiomes of our homes made me sign up for one of his lab projects called “The Wild Life of our Homes.” Rob’s team is collecting data from about 1,000 houses across the United States. When I write “data” you should picture a giant Q-tip.

To help Rob’s project, I had to swipe this giant Q-tip across a few surfaces in my house. The microbes captured by these swabs will be analyzed in a laboratory in Colorado. (Wild Life has promised me photos of this lab.) Just to return to the data loggers – some of us who sampled our homes are gathering additional information on temperature and humidity. (That’s what the two loggers at my home will be doing.)

But my participation in Rob’s project is honestly just part of an evolving interest of mine in what some people call big data. For someone like myself, who writes mostly about medicine and health, big data might have seemed more the territory of computer scientists. But believe me, big data is a part of all of our health lives. Carl Zimmer has written eloquently about this in this story.

Collecting information on the thousands of microbes (and their genetic footprints) in my house may turn out – years from now – to yield some useful information about health. As you may know, there are already people studying the internal (gut) microbiomes of people for clues to how that data may be mined for useful patterns. One of these research groups is also using citizen volunteers – Ubiome.

You can follow both Wild Life and Ubiome on Twitter at @yourwild_life and @ubiome

In Seattle, I meet scientists who are working at this intersection all the time. The Institute for Systems Biology is just one example. ISB has held conferences about the microbiome for several years, and you can listen to archives from 2012 at that link.  On the campus of the University of Washington, there are dozens of people I know who use algorithms to analyze giant data sets related to human health. There is much more to come on all of this.