Abstract
Following the French Revolution, society becomes the leading dimension of existence, more prominent than the state and government. According to the “hygienic party”, who promoted health and education, statistics can contribute to an understanding not only of the main causes of disease and death, but also of crime and unrest; scientific ground can be provided for social policy. All kinds of social phenomena are classified, measured, and made public, and large-scale statistical recurrences are identified. In the “avalanche of numbers” published, the first sociologists recognized mass regularities in order to identify laws of human behaviour. Nowadays, the availability of Big Data paves the way to new epistemological challenges. Will the new data revolution lead to a new paradigm in Sociology?
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Notes
- 1.
Statistical data were treated as strictly confidential due to their potential military value. Later, revolutionary governments would proclaim the necessity to publicize them.
- 2.
In 1889, Galton affirmed that the law of error “reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway”.
- 3.
In The Taming of Chance, Hacking (1990) compared Prussian (and Eastern European) attitude towards numerical data with the position of scholars in Great Britain, France, and the other countries of Western Europe. It was the West, where libertarian, individualistic, and atomistic notions of person and state were spreading, to start to formulate social laws based on data.
- 4.
With Big Data, I intend here extensively all the data and information that are capable of meeting the requirements of all the characteristics that have been identified in the literature, such as the three “Vs”: Volume, Velocity, and Variety (Giardullo 2015, 2).
- 5.
“Perhaps the most important element distinguishing Big Data from other huge collections of data, that is, census data, is the fast and automatic generation of a high volume of information, which means delegating data collection to an automatic device. In fact, huge databases are ‘populated’ through specific scripts that are nested in servers and types of counter machinery” (Giardullo 2015, 2).
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Saracino, B. (2017). Data Revolutions in Sociology. In: Lauro, N., Amaturo, E., Grassia, M., Aragona, B., Marino, M. (eds) Data Science and Social Research. Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55477-8_4
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