The arrival of the digital age has had an enormous impact on many facets of daily life. One of the pressing issues facing society today is the evolving relationship between technology and people. The Digital Society research cluster of CityU’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences (CLASS) looks at different aspects of digital data in today’s society. On the one hand, the positives include being able to cover a lot more ground than previously, with keyword searches, computational analysis, and much more data at one’s disposal. However, with an overload of information – and the issue of whom takes control of the data – the digital transformation creates new challenges for educators and society in general. To examine the trends of big data analysis and discuss how people deal with the challenges, CLASS co-organised an online symposium with the Department of Media and Communication (COM), Department of Chinese and History (CAH), and Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences at Zhejiang University, entitled “When Big Data Meets Sociological Imagination: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Infrastructures for Computational Social Science” on 15 June 2022. 

The symposium began with a keynote dialogue between distinguished scholars and was followed by four presentations. About 210 people attended this symposium on Zoom and more than 2,700 people watched the livestream on the Internet. Dr TSUI Lik-hang, Convenor of the Digital Society cluster and also Assistant Professor of CAH, welcomed the speakers and participants by introducing the Digital Society cluster, and emphasised “the understanding of the relationship between technology and society informed by both the humanities and social sciences must involve vigorous interdisciplinary research.” Next, Dr LIN Fen, moderator and convenor of the Symposium and also Associate Professor of COM explained the background of this symposium, noting that although fruitful results have been gained in social sciences, the big data movement still sees challenges in the measurement, the generation of social theories, the governance and infrastructure of data, and more.

Professor ZHAO Dingxin, chair of the Department of Sociology at Zhejiang University, was invited to be one of the keynote speakers to have a dialogue with another keynote speaker Professor CHEN Zhiwu, Chair Professor of Finance and incoming Director of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong. Prof Zhao summarised four dangers of big data movements: the ignorance of contextual knowledge, the uncertainty of the reality derived from the data, the possible pitfalls of associational analysis, and the interference from powerful providers of the data. Prof Chen shared his previous research on the underlying trends of the use of quantitative methods among economics, political science, and history fields in recent 40 years. The two professors exchanged their ideas about the advantages and shortcomings of big data analytics in social science at the current stage, the potential and ways big data will be shaping the development of social theories, and the status of disciplinary boundaries in social science. Prof Jonathan ZHU, Chair Professor of COM at CityU joined in the latter part of the scholarly discussion and offered his opinions on big data. He emphasised the unknown nature and the unknowability of a lot of data employed in big data research. Many models based on these are not predictive, but are explanatory ones only.

Four presentations were followed by the keynote dialogue. Dr CHEN Kaiping, Assistant Professor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, first delivered her presentation entitled “When National Identity Meets Conspiracies: The Contagion of National Identity Language on Public Participation and Discourse about COVID-19 Conspiracies”. Her research aimed at understanding large-scale public engagement activities with misinformation and counter-narratives on social media by applying the Social Identity Model of Deindividuation Effects model. The second presentation was hosted by Dr Alexander HOHL, Assistant Professor of the Department of Geography at the University of Utah. His presentation entitled “The Geography of Anti-Asian Hate on Twitter during the COVID-19 Pandemic, November 2019 to May 2020,” echoed Dr Chen’s sharing. His research aimed to explore the spatial concentration of anti-Asian sentiment on social media. The third speaker Dr ZHANG Xiaoming, who is a PhD candidate from the University of Hong Kong, spoke on “Information Foundations of State Capacity: Evidence from the Imperial Bureaucracy of China”. This research studies a communication reform in the imperial bureaucracy of Qing China, which allowed certain local officials (functioning as informants) to report to the emperor directly, to examine the capacity of information acquisition and transmission of the state. Last but not least, Dr LI Linzhuo, Assistant Professor of the Department of Sociology at Zhejiang University gave a speech “Epistemological Issues of Big Data Researches in Social Science” presenting an exploratory analysis, in order to understand the pattern of quantitative social science researches under the era of big data and to characterise specific forms of the data. 

After all the insightful presentations, a panel discussion and a Q&A session were hosted. The symposium was brought to a perfect end with the heated intellectual exchanges among the speakers and audience on big data analytics in social science. The Digital Society research cluster will continue to nurture the cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional collaboration in reflecting on the advanced use of big data in social research.