Social Science in the Era of Big Data

Digital technologies keep track of everything we do and say while we are online, and we spend online an increasing portion of our time. Databases hidden behind web services and applications are constantly fed with information of our movements and communication patterns, and a significant dimension of our lives, quantified to unprecedented levels, gets stored in those vast online repositories. This article considers some of the implications of this torrent of data for social science research, and for the types of questions we can ask of the world we inhabit. The goal of the article is twofold: to explain why, in spite of all the data, theory still matters to build credible stories of what the data reveal; and to show how this allows social scientists to revisit old questions at the intersection of new technologies and disciplinary approaches. The article also considers how Big Data research can transform policymaking, with a focus on how it can help us improve communication and governance in policy-relevant domains

¿SOCIEDADES ARTIFICIALES? Una introducción a la simulación social

These lines have a twofold objective: to introduce social simulation as a technique of analysis, and to offer a view of its uses and possibilities. The article starts with a couple of examples aimed to illustrate the practice of simulation. The methodological aspects associated to it are then exposed to, finally, highlight the pros (and cons) of its use. The aim of social simulation is the same as that of statistical equations and ideal types: to generate models of the social reality that help us to build or validate theories about its regularities. What turns social simulation into an innovative analytical strategy is not its objectives but rather its means: programming algorithms that contain the behavioural rules of agents that interact among them and with their environment. The advantages of social simulation are not only experimental but also, and specially, theoretic: it allows the search of the mechanisms that statistical models cannot provide