Understanding the paradigm shift to computational social science in presence of big data (Chang et alii, 2012)
“The era of big data has created exciting new opportunities for research to achieve high relevance and impact amid changes and transformations in how we study social science phenomena. With the emergence of very large-scale data collection techniques and the related new technological support, there seem to be fundamental changes that are occurring with the research questions we can ask, and the research methods we can apply. The contexts include social networks and blogs, political discourse on the Internet, corporate announcements and digital journalism, mobile telephony and digital home entertainment, online gaming and social shopping, and social advertising and social commerce – and much more. The increasingly advantageous costs of data collection, and the new capabilities that researchers have to conduct research that leverages the spectrum of micro-, meso and macro-level data suggest the possibility of a scientific paradigm shift toward computational social science with big data”
http://www2.sis.smu.edu.sg/icec2012/downloads/BCSI_Theme_Paper.pdf
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