Big Data as a methodology for social research: Proposals, disclaimers, and dilemmas from sociology
- Héctor Puente Bienvenido Universidad Complutense de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7441-1908
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- Diego de Haro Gázquez Universidad Complutense de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1350-725X
- Sergio D'Antonio Maceiras Universidad Politécnica de Madrid https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8320-0902
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Abstract
The widely cited article ‘The coming crisis of empirical sociology’ foresaw an imminent problem of empirical sociology: its inability to incorporate the ‘transactional’ data of cognitive capitalism into its research practice. While the progressive expansion of technological intermediation in social interaction processes has generated an important techno-scientific barrier, the issue is, above all, economic and political, relegating sociology (and its methods) to the rear of social and market research. In this article, we develop a kind of archaeology of the construction of the concept of ‘Big Data’, exploring the main methodological alternatives proposed by the social sciences and the new perspectives that have emerged as a result of the concentration of information in a smaller number of companies.
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