  This paper argues that there are three fundamental challenges that need to be
overcome in order to foster the adoption of big data technologies in
non-computer science related disciplines: addressing issues of accessibility of
such technologies for non-computer scientists, supporting the ad hoc
exploration of large data sets with minimal effort and the availability of
lightweight web-based frameworks for quick and easy analytics. In this paper,
we address the above three challenges through the development of 'BigExcel', a
three tier web-based framework for exploring big data to facilitate the
management of user interactions with large data sets, the construction of
queries to explore the data set and the management of the infrastructure. The
feasibility of BigExcel is demonstrated through two Yahoo Sandbox datasets. The
first dataset is the Yahoo Buzz Score data set we use for quantitatively
predicting trending technologies and the second is the Yahoo n-gram corpus we
use for qualitatively inferring the coverage of important events. A
demonstration of the BigExcel framework and source code is available at
http://bigdata.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/projects/bigexcel-exploring-big-data-for-social-sciences/.
