TY - JOUR
T1 - Meaningful measures of human society in the twenty-first century
AU - Lazer, David
AU - Hargittai, Eszter
AU - Freelon, Deen
AU - Gonzalez-Bailon, Sandra
AU - Munger, Kevin
AU - Ognyanova, Katherine
AU - Radford, Jason
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements D.L. acknowledges support from the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation. E.H. acknowledges support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2021/7/8
Y1 - 2021/7/8
N2 - Science rarely proceeds beyond what scientists can observe and measure, and sometimes what can be observed proceeds far ahead of scientific understanding. The twenty-first century offers such a moment in the study of human societies. A vastly larger share of behaviours is observed today than would have been imaginable at the close of the twentieth century. Our interpersonal communication, our movements and many of our everyday actions, are all potentially accessible for scientific research; sometimes through purposive instrumentation for scientific objectives (for example, satellite imagery), but far more often these objectives are, literally, an afterthought (for example, Twitter data streams). Here we evaluate the potential of this massive instrumentation—the creation of techniques for the structured representation and quantification—of human behaviour through the lens of scientific measurement and its principles. In particular, we focus on the question of how we extract scientific meaning from data that often were not created for such purposes. These data present conceptual, computational and ethical challenges that require a rejuvenation of our scientific theories to keep up with the rapidly changing social realities and our capacities to capture them. We require, in other words, new approaches to manage, use and analyse data.
AB - Science rarely proceeds beyond what scientists can observe and measure, and sometimes what can be observed proceeds far ahead of scientific understanding. The twenty-first century offers such a moment in the study of human societies. A vastly larger share of behaviours is observed today than would have been imaginable at the close of the twentieth century. Our interpersonal communication, our movements and many of our everyday actions, are all potentially accessible for scientific research; sometimes through purposive instrumentation for scientific objectives (for example, satellite imagery), but far more often these objectives are, literally, an afterthought (for example, Twitter data streams). Here we evaluate the potential of this massive instrumentation—the creation of techniques for the structured representation and quantification—of human behaviour through the lens of scientific measurement and its principles. In particular, we focus on the question of how we extract scientific meaning from data that often were not created for such purposes. These data present conceptual, computational and ethical challenges that require a rejuvenation of our scientific theories to keep up with the rapidly changing social realities and our capacities to capture them. We require, in other words, new approaches to manage, use and analyse data.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41586-021-03660-7
DO - 10.1038/s41586-021-03660-7
M3 - Review article
C2 - 34194043
AN - SCOPUS:85109226222
VL - 595
SP - 189
EP - 196
JO - Nature
JF - Nature
SN - 0028-0836
IS - 7866
ER -