Big Data & Data Science in Information Law and Policy Research

We present two projects that used big data, and data science methods to support law and policy research with empirical evidence on digital media production and consumption. The simple case concerns the automatic scraping of news media websites to gather data on what is being published by news organizations. The complex case is about Robin, a research infrastructure which allows volunteers to donate their web browsing data stream so the process of personalized communications online can be studied. We discuss the issues researchers need to consider during the planning, data collection, and analysis phases of big data based research. We conclude that despite the limitations, difficulties and well-justified critique, social scientists, legal scholars, and researchers working in the humanities need to develop individual skills, and institutional competencies in big data methods, because data science is quickly becoming to be an indispensable part of the methodological tool-set of these disciplines