Speaking sociologically with big data: symphonic social science and the future for big data research

Susan Halford and Mike Savage

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Recent years have seen persistent tension between proponents of big data analytics, using new forms of digital data to make computational and statistical claims about ‘the social’, and many sociologists sceptical about the value of big data, its associated methods and claims to knowledge. We seek to move beyond this, taking inspiration from a mode of argumentation pursued by Piketty, Putnam and Wilkinson and Pickett that we label ‘symphonic social science’. This bears both striking similarities and significant differences to the big data paradigm and – as such – offers the potential to do big data analytics differently. This offers value to those already working with big data – for whom the difficulties of making useful and sustainable claims about the social are increasingly apparent – and to sociologists, offering a mode of practice that might shape big data analytics for the future

Keywords: big data; computational methods; sociology; symphonic social science; visualisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-big, nep-his, nep-hpe, nep-pay and nep-pke
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published in Sociology, 1, December, 2017, 51(6), pp. 1132-1148. ISSN: 0038-0385

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