Owing to its unrivalled onomatopoeic capabilities, it provides both a medium of lifelike expression that the cleverest European raconteur could never aspire to, and offers an ever-ready means for the coining of endless new words ... Indeed, in certain respects it is probable that no living European language, if left only to its own resources and unable to borrow from other languages, could even compare with it ... The Zulu language, then, is eminently well-stocked and vividly expressive, is resourceful and plastic to all demands.74

Consequently,researchers are much more likely to focus on something in the present orimmediate past – tracking reactions to an election, TV finale, or natural disaster– because of the sheer difficulty or impossibility of accessing older data

establising

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematicsreplace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with everytheory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy,ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? Thepoint is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fide-lity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. (2008)

We are social scientists and media studies scholarswho are in regular conversation with computer scientists and informaticsexperts. The questions that we ask are hard ones without easy answers, althoughwe also describe different pitfalls that may seem obvious to social scientists but areoften surprising to those from different disciplines

Lessig(1999) argues that social systems are regulated by four forces: market, law,social norms, and architecture – or, in the case of technology, code.

Mythology: the widespread belief that large data sets offer a higher form ofintelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previouslyimpossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy