In the late 1990s, Google pioneered the idea of scraping and repurposing digital traces
as a new form of data with which to understand people’s preferences and behaviour.
This way of generating empirical sensitivity towards the world can be termed digital
methods and the last five years have seen such methods gain influence beyond the field
of Internet search. Organizations of different kinds are increasingly mentioning the
need to harness the intelligence of ‘big’ digital datasets, and the social sciences have
similarly been marked by suggestions to move away from established methods such as
surveys and focus groups, and learn from the way Google and other companies have
succeeded in turning big datasets into knowledge of social dynamics. By enabling new
combinations of data and software and by providing new ways of searching,
aggregating, and cross-referencing empirical datasets, it seems probable that the spread
of digital methods will re-configure the way organizations, social scientists, and
citizens ‘see’ the world in which they live
