Le moment big data des sciences sociales

Few topics have generated in recent years much interest in public debate and in the social sciences as big data. Scanning a growing number of social activities regularly with new data and also supplies an intense reflection on the functioning of modern societies as well as the terms of the production of knowledge about them. Thus, much of the literature on big data in the social sciences is between two approaches. The first is to characterize instrumentally these data say mass as opposed to survey data, traditionally used by the researchers. She questions the use made of it (Kitchin, 2014) as one that could be made (Beer and Burrows, 2007; Boullier, 2015, Varian, 2014). The second approach opposes the excitement of the big data, mainly in the field of market activities, an analysis of the risks from the use of this type of data: the fear of obsolescence of the scientific method of data analysis called to be replaced by automated method without strong link with social theories (Anderson, 2008) but also, and above all, the emergence of a new form of society “led by the data” (Pentland, 2012), upsetting our ways of living, working and thinking (Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier, 2013), raising novel ethical issues (Boyd and Crawford 2012) and heralding the advent of a new “governmentality” social (Rouvroy and Berns, 2013). [googletranslate_en]