ABSTRACT
Big data is evolving at the intersection of technology and changed social realities. Big data has appeared in discourses of marketization, touted as a “new class of economic asset”, comparable even to gold and currency. Big data arguments have drawn attention to the fact that a significant proportion of human social interaction is “informationalized”—generated and relayed through digital information networks, leaving data traces of social interaction that are often geolocated and time-stamped. Researchers have combined big data generated from research-purposed mobile phones for college students, with ethnographic fieldwork performed by a participant observational anthropologist who collected “thick” ethnographic fieldwork data on friendship and social relations. Ethnographers and other qualitative researchers study in a big data world of mediatization. The debates about big data and its potentials and limitations for qualitative research can be informed by what is known about the general methodological problems and transformations brought about through digitization.
