Big data in computational social science and humanities

Abstract

This book is unique in the sense that it treats big data as a key driver to actively engage social scientists and humanists together in order to at least prepare their dialogues in the future. In this vein, the book can be related to the recent book Cents and Sensibility (2017), authored by Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro. They considered that social scientists can learn from the humanities in their inherent wisdom. Throughout their book, Morson and Schapiro have employed Isaiah Berlin’s famous caricature “Hedgehogs and Foxes” to shed light on the difference between the social sciences and humanities. We appreciate their viewpoints. As for us, we believe that computational social scientists can benefit greatly from their conversations with humanists, but we also believe that such conversations can be much facilitated if the humanities can also be studied in a computational format.