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In Search of the Digital Actors, or Sociology in the Age of Big Data

Summary/Abstract: The Internet is an increasingly important mediator in social life, changing everyday routine and the ways we communicate. New means of digital materialisation of the sign and social relationships bring change in the manner we conceptualize the modern world. The new ways of generating quantitative data create qualitatively different forms for social reflection, creating а new representation of “society”. Whether we like it or not, big data and new digital assemblage are here to stay and they are going to play more and more important roles in production of social knowledge. This brings both challenges and opportunities for sociology and social sciences. The aim of the following article is to outline a possible way for sociological understanding of the new digital data assemblages. In particular, I propose one of the instruments of machine learning - topic modeling - for analysis of large arrays of texts. Тhe aim is to show its relevance for the sociological analisis and the actor-network theory. The article tries to link the topic modeling to the Science Po Médialab’s research program and its quali-quanti approach, which tries to navigate between the general and the particular. For doing this, the article offers an example of an empirical study of the construction of Bulgarian internet services market and its digital space.

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