Quantitative Ethnography: Human Science in the Age of Big Data

In this talk, David Williamson Shaffer looks at the transformation of the social sciences in the age of Big Data through the lens of Quantitative Ethnography, an approach to analyzing human behavior that integrates data-mining, discourse analysis, social interactionism, cognition, learning science, statistics, and ethnography to produce new and innovative ways of thinking that go beyond the old dichotomy of qualitative and quantitative methods and past simple mixtures of methods in thinking about data and data analysis.