Epistemology of the Digital

Abstract

The debate on the consequences that big data and computational techniques have generated in social sciences has developed from two opposite extremes. A consistent group of scholars today supports an active commitment of sociologists in dealing with the technological dimension of social investigation. The works developed by these “digital sociologists” focus on the definition of a method of social research that adopts a critical posture on the role that digital technology must have in scientific research but, at the same time, creative on the possibilities offered by technology to research. This posture requires great attention to the epistemology of the digital.