In their 2007 paper 'The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology', Mike Savage and Roger Burrows argued that as a result of the inundation of digital data, empirical sociology may lose its methodological edge and thereby its jurisdiction over questions of the 'social'. To their surprise, the article has since then become the most cited article to appear in the journal Sociology – the journal of original publication - in the last decade.
In their commentary in Big Data & Society, Roger and Mike reflect upon the arguments they made back then. Here is a video abstract of Roger introducing their BD&S article 'After the Crisis? Big Data and the Methodological Challenges of Empirical Sociology':
