Featured Roundtable - Big data in Political Science

Abstract

‘The digital age is everywhere, it’s growing, and it changes what is possible for researchers.’ (Salganik, 2018: 2) Change in technology allows us to collect massive amounts of data from a wide range of sources. As social scientists, we study people’s behaviour. Never before have we seen such a detailed and broad collection of data on people’s behaviour as we see it now in the age of the internet. Big data proponents see the potential to ask new questions that we were not able to answer before the availability of large-scale datasets. They also state that we are now able to process more information at a faster pace and might be quicker in understanding recent events and predicting potential future scenarios. However, big data is ‘no free lunch’ and researchers are confronted with ethical questions on data protection and intellectual property rights. The roundtable offers a platform to discuss opportunities, but also challenges, of big data in political science. It involves answering (among many others) questions such as: • How can we advance our knowledge of social phenomena using big data? • Which new insights can we gain with the greater availability of data? Are we able to study completely new research questions? Or, are we simply asking old questions using big data instead of small-scale data? • Does knowledge production become faster in the digital age and does this mean a loss in quality in research outputs? • What is the predictive power of big data? • How prevalent and problematic is the selection bias in big data? • How can we be good academic citizens while using big data? The roundtable brings together speakers with extensive experience in using large scale-datasets. Participants are diverse in their research topics and methods; yet, they all use big data to answer exciting research questions. Some of the panellists are, however, more optimistic than others in using unstructured large databases.