Today, researchers are using LinkedIn data in a variety of ways: to find and recruit participants for research and experiments to analyze how the features of this network affect people’s behavior and identity or how data is used for hiring and recruiting purposes.

The ability to work with digital research methods and data analysis is opening up a whole new world of research potential for social scientists. No one knows this better than Digital Sociologist Dr. James Allen-Robertson from the University of Essex. For him, these new techniques have enabled multiple interdisciplinary research collaborations and a whole new world of funding and professional opportunities.

Here, James tells us how computational social science has given him and his research output a new lease of life.

A grant program that provides early stage funding for innovative software ideas that support social science researchers working with big data and new technology is now accepting applications.

SAGE Publishing surveyed social scientists around the world to learn more about who engages in research using ‘big data,’ and what challenges they face as well as the barriers facing those who are interested in conducting computational social science going forward.

A new survey shoots down the idea that early-career researchers aresomehow more likely to be digital natives and therefore more apt to conduct computational social science than those whose PhDs were issued more than a decade ago.

Political scientists Gary King has called on the policymakers and government officials in the audience to consider enacting a ‘treaty’ on the collection, retention, access and sharing of big data that could serve the needs of the academic world, the commercial world and government while protecting the interests of the public.

Computers have revolutionized academic research – and at the same time created a new crop of problems. But, suggests Ben Marwick, computers can also help address some of the challenges they have created.

Everyone has experience being human, and so findings in social science coincide with something that we have either experienced or can imagine experiencing. The result is that social science all too often seems like common sense.