A provocative paper co-authored by Bruno Latour, calling for a new spirit of collaboration between social scientists and natural scientists:
This does not mean, of course, that the modeling tradition of natural sciences ceases to be relevant for the study of collective life. Quite the contrary! Such experience is crucial to develop the new methods necessary to handle larger and more diverse datasets. At the beginning of the 19th century natural and social scientists developed together a new discipline, “statistics”, that helped them to interpret the new data available at that time (Hacking 1990; Desrosières 2002). Today, the advent of digital data poses a similar challenge and calls for a similar alliance. Micro-macro models have run their course. The time is now to develop the formal techniques necessary to unfold the origami of collective existence and this should be the aim of the renewed alliance between the social and natural sciences. For the next few years, at least, efforts should be shifted from simulating to mapping, from simple explanations to complex observations
Categories: Digital Sociology
Tags: big data, computational social science, digital data, natural science, social science
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