Big Data, Analysis of

This entry describes what so‐called Big Data are and how they can be analyzed in communication science and the computational social sciences more broadly. It briefly addresses the epistemological questions around this type of analysis and its historical development in communication science and related disciplines. The entry then moves on to a more practical description of the technical requirements, the structure of such datasets, and their storage in different types of databases. It gives an overview of different analytical approaches, including, but not limited to, visualizations, supervised and unsupervised machine learning, natural language processing, and network analysis. Ethical implications and future directions are discussed.