Big Data as a methodology for social research: Proposals, disclaimers, and dilemmas from sociology

The widely cited article 'The coming crisis of empirical sociology' foresaw an imminent problem of empirical sociology: its inability to incorporate the 'transactional' data of cognitive capitalism into its research practice. While the progressive expansion of technological intermediation in social interaction processes has generated an important techno-scientific barrier, the issue is, above all, economic and political, relegating sociology (and its methods) to the rear of social and market research. In this article, we develop a kind of archaeology of the construction of the concept of 'Big Data', exploring the main methodological alternatives proposed by the social sciences and the new perspectives that have emerged as a result of the concentration of information in a smaller number of companies.