7.2 Digital and Social Media Research’s Mainstream: Positivist Big Data Analytics
A study of 27,340 Internet Studies published between 2000 and 2009 and indexed in the Social Sciences and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index found that only 31% cited theoretical works (Peng et al. 2013). There is a tendency in Internet Studies to engage with theory only on the micro- and middle-range levels that theorise single online phenomena but neglect the larger picture of society as a totality (Rice and Fuller 2013). Such theories tend to be atomised. They just focus on single phenomena and miss society’s big picture.
The same study found that 59% of the conducted research used quantitative methods (Tai-Quan et al. 2013). A new trend in quantitative Internet Studies is big data analytics that has a focus on collecting large amounts of data from social media platforms and analysing it in a predominantly quantitative manner. The new media research guru Lev Manovich has argued that Internet Studies should be turned into the large-scale computational analysis of online data. He terms this approach Cultural Analytics (Manovich 2009) and Software Studies.<sup>3</sup> Web Science has a strong focus on computational analysis, and mathematical methods have also been the foundation of the approach of Web Science that understands itself explicitly as a merger of physical science and computer science (Berners-Lee et al. 2006, 3). The obsession with quantification, the use of computation in the social sciences, and big data have also manifested itself as a preoccupation with attempts to develop new digital methods in both the humanities and social sciences: “Digital Humanities” often understands itself as humanities computing (Terras et al. 2013). The Collaborative Social Media Observatory, a strategic £1.5 million science and computer science investment project funded in the United Kingdom by institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, the UK Department of Health, and others in the years 2012–2015, understands “social media research” explicitly as big data analytics, namely the analysis of “aggregate information in ‘big social data’ repositories, such as collective sentiment scores for sub-groups of twitter users”.<sup>4</sup>
In the United Kingdom, the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) strategic theme “Digital Transformations” received an injection of government funding specifically to boost big data research, which resulted in 2014 in funding of 21 big data research projects with a total funding sum of £4.7 million,<sup>5</sup> meaning that a very large part of projects funded via the AHRC Digital Transformations theme have been explorations and uses of big data.
Digital and Social Media Research’s Mainstream: Positivist Big Data Analytics
Chapter Seven | Digital Positivism and Administrative
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3 http://lab.softwarestudies.com
4 http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/cosmos/ethics-resource-guide/