Having read through these sections now I am struck by the absence of any discussion of what geographers call "volunteered geographic information" and the potential that "big data" has for mapping social phenomena because data points often are frequently geo-referenced. Also, these data tend to offer broader geographic coverage than many traditional data sources.

redundant

Some of it is sensitive, some has the potential to become sensitive (e.g. when a person who's been sharing location data starts being stalked, previously harmless-seeming data becomes sensitive).

principal

this is helpful

Strengths of having time series is not really discussed below, but are evident in the context of event detection and things like that.

perhaps "transactional" would be a better word than administrative

awkward phrasing

why by governments? private actors, too

Probably premature to raise this, but in my view it's not just about increasing power but also about a shifting balance of power between researchers, research informants, and the commercial entities that own/control data (which didn't use to be in the picture)

more cheaply

starting to interact

that seems optimistic -- there are lots of new practical considerations in connection with digital age research (such as data management), I wouldn't expect researchers to automatically be freed up to think about ethics. Their ability to be ethical has a lot to do with their work conditions, which both within and outside of academia aren't always favorable.

not sure about word choice here

comes

I think one step before -- how to ask questions -- is also quite an important one for both communities to work on together, but I see your point that connections can be forged more easily around practical concerns than around abstractions and theories.

Not sure about that -- there's been talk of an end of Moore's law and that the right-hand curve will start looking more like a sigmoid curve (on this, I'm actually thinking of some musings by Peter Frase: http://www.peterfrase.com/2010/12/social-science-fiction/)

Here you make it appear like this combination is mostly about combining different kinds of methods, but in the preface you alluded to "wisdom" of social thought in making sense of social data. That is absent from the discussion so far.

"the dialectic of quantity and quality"

why go with "information" rather than data? Information implies that this data deluge somehow has the capacity to inform, which may or may not be the case

awkward, better to say smart

Will most sociologists picking up a book like this know what "data science" is? I have difficulty estimating how mainstream this term has become.

distinct

I went and looked up the article because I immediately had a million questions that aren't addressed in your summary of Blumenstock et al.'s research. At first I was going to suggest providing some additional detail (for instance about why mobile phone records can be assumed to provide good coverage in a country like Rwanda), but then I realized this is probably exactly the right kind of feeling to leave readers with at this point: eager to find out more about how it all works. So I think this section is quite effective.