Need advanced and new skills for capturing, collecting, storing, manipulating and analyzing often un/semi-structured big datasets
e.g. interacting with APIs, machine learning, social network analysis
Our advantage… theory
Computer scientists dominate field of big social data but more rarely come up with good questions/explanations
Big data requires same standards as “small” data (Grimmer 2015)
Careful research design, sampling strategy, measurement etc.
References
Grimmer, Justin. 2015. “We Are All Social Scientists Now: How Big Data, Machine Learning, and Causal Inference Work Together.” PS Polit. Sci. Polit. 48 (1). Cambridge University Press: 80–83.