1.15 CSS: Chances

• “For much of its history, empirical work in the social sciences has been defined by scarcity. Data were hard to find, surveys were costly to field, and record storage was close to impossible. Computation was an even more pressing bottleneck with limited and expensive computing time. The consequence of this scarcity was that social scientists developed and relied on statistical techniques that enabled progress with few data and even less computing power.” (Grimmer, Roberts, and Stewart 2021, 396)
  • Today: Abundance.. rapid expansion of data, new forms of data and computing power (e.g., automize classification tasks in research using ML)

References

Grimmer, Justin, Margaret E Roberts, and Brandon M Stewart. 2021. “Machine Learning for Social Science: An Agnostic Approach.” Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci. 24 (1): 395–419.