ABSTRACT

Chapter 3: Everything Old Is New Again: Big Data and Methodological Transparency, Leticia Bode

Social science is broadly embracing big data, mainly for its ability to speak to new ideas, capture difficult-to-reach populations, and find people in their natural habitats. This chapter focuses on other, less obvious benefits of big data; heightened visibility, increased accessibility, and the ability to help us rethink our assumptions. Although social science has progressed enormously in the past fifty years, most of the methodological progress has been in terms of computing power, whereas the data upon which social scientists rely has generally stayed the same. Big data represents a major shift for the social sciences because it is the first major new source of data in decades. This new influx of data forces scholars to rethink the assumptions they make about data and about the world—about people, attitudes, behaviors, communication, institutions, platforms, and especially models, methods, and data. Thus, the benefit of big data reaches beyond the data themselves, and throughout the research community writ large. This essay will explore how and why that occurs, and the implications of it for the field of political communication.