Big Data … Why (Oh Why?) This Computational Social Science?

Abstract

Many others, in this volume and elsewhere, have and will comment on the political, social, economic, cultural and ethical implications of Big Data.(1) I strongly agree that those implications are important.Indeed, I believe they are the most urgent aspects of Big Data with which critically engaged social science must grapple.There is a good fight to be fought in the public arena over the many worrying directions in which the political-economic impulses driving Big Data are pointing.The complicated ways in which the Big Data movement (if we can call it that) is entangled with a burgeoning, authoritarian and surveillant state, simultaneously enabling and in thrall to a rhetoric of free-market 'disruption', demand our close attention, if they are to be countered by more humane alternatives.There is, of course, a substantial literature that refuses to roll over before the technological triumphalism (or is it fatalism?) of work such as Too Big To Know (Weinberger, 2011) and Big Data (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013).Many of the concerns raised by the current moment are ably dissected in Digital Disconnect (McChesney, 2013), The Filter Bubble (Pariser, 2011), You Are Not A Gadget (Lanier, 2010) Who Owns The Future? (Lanier, 2014), and To Save Everything, Click Here (Morozov, 2013) among others.Given the centrality of geographical data of one kind or another to the data deluge, it is surely important that geographers become more visible in this public conversation (Farmer and Pozdnoukhov, 2012).Substantial contributions like Code/Space (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011)

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