ABSTRACT
Computational social science is a field of research practices that seeks to predict macroscopic social, economic, and political outcomes by processing the massive amount of “digital traces” people produce daily. For at least a few decades now, humans and non-humans have been leaving such traces behind by interacting with computers, by connecting to the Internet, and by allowing their presence and movements in cities to be digitally recorded. In the last decade, computational social science has shifted its focus from the digital space of social media to the analog space of cities and metropolitan regions. The increased digitalization of urban practices, fueled by ubiquitous connectivity and an abundance of connected services, has fostered this transition. Pentland presents one of the very few exceptions to the lack of theory in computational social science. In a series of publications he gives his own account of a theory of innovation, which he bases on empirical studies he has been conducting since the mid-1990s.
