Bigger sociological imaginations: framing big social data theory and methods

Making effective use of big social data requires us to frame that work in useful ways, ways that draw connections between new methods and a long history of social methods and theories. In particular, the key questions of big social data – those of relating observations of features at scale to practical outcomes for individuals and groups – are core sociological questions. We need to develop a new, bigger sociological imagination that allows us to incorporate big social data rather than reinventing the wheel. That requires careful mining of our methodological and theoretical history, along with a reexamination of the ways in which we collect and use our data.