Abstract
This chapter looks into how big data and data science methods can be used to support law and policy research with empirical evidence on digital media production and consumption. To this end we analyze two cases. The simple case concerns the automatic scraping of news media websites to gather data on what is being published by news organizations. The complex case is about Robin, a research infrastructure which allows volunteers to donate their web browsing data stream so the process of personalized communications online can be studied. We discuss the issues researchers need to consider during the planning, data collection, and analysis phases of big data based research. We conclude that despite the limitations, difficulties and well-justified critique, social scientists, legal scholars, and researchers working in the humanities need to develop individual skills, and institutional competencies in big data methods, because data science is quickly becoming to be an indispensable part of the methodological tool-set of these disciplines.
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Further Reading
Bodó, B., Helberger, N., Irion, K., Borgesius Zuiderveen, F. J., Moller, J., van der Velde, B., … de Vreese, C. H. (2017). Tackling the algorithmic control crisis—The technical, legal, and ethical challenges of research into algorithmic agents. Yale Journal of Law & Technology, 19, 133.
Borgesius, F. Z., Gray, J., & Eechoud, M. V. (2015). Open data, privacy, and fair information principles: Towards a balancing framework. Berkeley Technology Law Journal, 30, 2073.
Kitchin, R. (2014). Big data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts. Big Data & Society, 1(1), 2053951714528481.
Mitchell, R. (2018). Web scraping with python: Collecting more data from the modern web. Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media.
Shah, D. V., Cappella, J. N., & Neuman, W. R. (2015). Big data, digital media, and computational social science: Possibilities and perils. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 659(1), 6–13. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716215572084.
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Bodó, B., van de Velde, B. (2019). Analyzing Big Data. In: Van den Bulck, H., Puppis, M., Donders, K., Van Audenhove, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Methods for Media Policy Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16065-4_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16065-4_20
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