“Zur Sozialdynamik bewegter Körper”

Statistics is often regarded as the mathematics of gambling, and it has some roots in theorizing about games, indeed. But it was the steam engine that really made statistics do something: Thermodynamics, the physics of heat, energy, and gases. Aggregating over huge masses of particles – not observable on an individual level – by means of probability distribution was the paradigm of 19th century science. And this metaphor also was successfully adopted to describing not only masses of molecules, but also masses of people in a mass society.

For physics, at the end of the 19th century it had become clear, that models reduced on aggregates and distributions where not able to explain many observations that where experimentally proven, like black body radiation or the photo-electric effect. It was Max Planck and Albert Einstein that moved the perspective from statistical aggregates to something that had not been usually taken into consideration: the particle. Quantum physics is the description of physical phenomena on the most granular level possible. By changing focus from the indistinct mass to the individual particle, also the macroscopic level of physics started to make sense again, combining probabilistic concepts like entropy with the behavior of the single particle that we might visualize in a Feynman-diagram.

The Web presented for the first time a tool to collect data describing (nearly) everyone on the individual level. The best data came not from intentional research but from cookie-tracking, done to optimize advertising effectiveness. Social Media brought us the next level: semantic data, people talking about their lives, their preferences, their actions and feelings. And people connected with each other, the social graph showed who was talking to whom and about which topics – and how tight social bonds were knit.

We now have the data to model behavior without the need of aggregating. The role of statistics for the humanities changes – like it has done in physics 150 years ago. Statistics is now the tool to deal with distributions as phenomena as such rather than just generalizing from small samples to an unknown population. ‘Data humanity’ would be a much better term for what is usually called ‘data science’ – this I had written after O’Reilly’s Strata conference last year. But I think I might have been wrong as we move from social science to computational social science.

Social research is moving from humanities to science.

Further reading:

“Our Pythagorean World”