Cultural Machines: Unlocking the power of digital methods and computational techniques for understanding socio-cultural processes in digital environments

we can argue that a sort of new infrastructure of ‘cultural machines’ is emerging from digital platforms –made by an assemblage of platforms, pieces of software, content, and participatory cultures –, which can be used as a methodological resource to extract ‘thick descriptions’ from big data as well as interpret and analyse complex cultural processes on a very large scale. Given this emerging scenario, brand new methodological challenges pose to social researchers dealing with digital sociology and digital methods.