Thinking 'Big' in Deliberative Systems: What can Deliberative Democrats Learn from Big Data?

This paper considers the potential of big data for the study of deliberative systems. The systems turn in deliberative thinking stems from the realisation that to deliberative democracy and that many of these sites now include digital spaces like websites and social media. As as everyday political interactions increasingly leave digital traces; relevant texts and transcripts are archived online; and the sites involved in the production of discourses multiply, the growth of data can quickly become unwieldy for traditional qualitative methodologies. The capture of the these digital artefacts and byproducts of interactions provides researchers direct access to the constitutive materials of political life which enables greater analytical flexibility and successive revisions to the operationalization of data based on information observed elsewhere in the system. The paper outlines these changes in political life and proposes a methodology for identifying and tracking discourses throughout deliberative systems.