A Critical Examination of Computational Social Science

• In Event: Text-Based Machine Learning, Big Data, and the Social Study of Science - II

Abstract

This paper investigates the practices of an emerging field called computational social science---a research area dedicated “to leveraging the capacity to collect and analyze data at a scale that may reveal patterns of individual and group behaviors.” Drawing on historical arguments and sociological analyses, we contextualize computational social science as a recapitulation of the naturalist-interpretivist divide in the social sciences, and we highlight the political and economic factors that have influenced the rise of the field and its practices. Through a case study we examine what computational social science means to its practitioners and what its various impacts on the world are. Based on these analyses, we uncover the ontological assumptions of computational social science, arguing that the field is premised on abstraction and fundamentally oriented towards social control. Having unveiled the cloak of computational social science, we observe a parallel to the Science Wars of the 1990s. Hermeneutic social scientists are once again caught in the sights of Norbert Wiener’s anti-aircraft cybernetic canon.

Authors

• Karen Y Huang, Harvard University

• Peaks Krafft