What can a knowledge complexity approach reveal about big data and archival practice?

As one of the major technological concepts driving ICT development today, big data has been touted as offering new forms of analysis of research data. Its application has reached out across disciplines but some research sources and archival practices do not sit comfortably within the computational turn and this has sparked concerns that cultural heritage collections that cannot be structured, represented, or, indeed, digitised accordingly may be excluded and marginalised by this new paradigm. This work-in-progress paper reports on the contribution of the KPLEX project's knowledge complexity approach to understanding the relationship between big data and archival practice.