Sociology in the Era of Big Data: The Ascent of Forensic Social Science

The Computational Turn in Social Sciences. Challenges of the New Empiricism in the Age of Big Data

“…The 'good old' historical lines of demarcation between disciplines in terms of general epistemology, research subjects and questions, dominant methods seem to be vanishing. Probably for the first time in the history of science the field of engineering, the Internet industry, the disciplines of natural and social sciences are all focusing on similar types of data and similar types of questions (McFarland et al, 2015). This process of convergence holds great potential for all players who take an active part in this exciting transformation.…”

“…Interestingly, the wider scientific and public consciousness of Big Data dates back only to a few years of active marketing activities by the largest IT companies in advertising and selling their analytical solutions (Gandomi and Haider, 2015). The literature on interpreting Big Data from a social science perspective is expanding fast, but we still miss a uniform definition (Borgman, 2015;Csepeli, 2015;Dessewffy and Láng, 2015;Kitchin, 2014;McFarland et al, 2015;Székely, 2015). It is by far no coincidence, since the evolution of Big Data has been too quick and disordered so far, characterised by rapid technological changes.…”

“…If we believe the predictions on future developments, it might be accepted that currently we are still at the dawn of the new datafied world. From the perspective of social sciences it means that on the one hand, many old research questions could be approached anew from novel angles, but on the other hand, a whole new set of questions are also begging to be addressed (McFarland et al, 2015).…”

“…But if we accept that the current structural changes are similar in their effects to what happened in the second half of the 20 th century with the statistical and survey turn particularly in the field of sociology, there is obviously a high demand for social scientists who are prepared both in their methodological skills and theoretical knowledge. Computational ethnography, computational linguistics, network science, machine learning, Big Data based experiments (McFarland et al, 2015), etc. are all streams of research that require new analytic techniques and hold great potential for interdisciplinary collaborations.…”

Társadalomtudomány a Big Data korában

“…A Big Data csupán néhány éve került a köztudatba, elsősorban az analitikai megoldásokat szállí-tó nagy IT (információtechnológiai) vállalatok marketingtevékenységének köszönhe-tően (Gandomi-Haider [2015]). A Big Data társadalomtudományi szempontú értel-mezésének is napról napra növekvő irodalma van (Borgman [2015], Csepeli [2015], Dessewffy-Láng [2015], McFarland-Lewis-Goldberg [2015, Mutzel [2015], Szé-kely [2015]), azonban továbbra sem igazán létezik a fogalomnak egységes meghatá-rozása. Ez persze nem véletlen, hiszen a háttérben meghúzódó technikai fejlődés olyan gyors és "rendezetlen" volt, amely aligha adott lehetőséget az ilyen jellegű filológiai munkálkodásnak.…”