Big Data and New Tasks of Sociology
The methodological basis of the research. The main and research methods are methods of conceptual analysis of expert assessments, methods of comparison, generalization of conclusions, methods of systematization of the results of evaluation examinations, methods of data integration, methods of predictive analytics, expressed in the classification of different unrelated assessments. Research results. The article shows that large amounts of information in the form of Big Data become important sociological initial data, make it possible to more fully study social dynamics, create new dynamic models of social reality, commensurate with digital information on its basis, and become the basis for the formation of a new sociological theory - the theory of digital sociology. For it, new methodological challenges are identified that require the substantiation of new research methods and rethinking of tools and conceptual apparatus, for example, such as network and neural modeling, thematic modeling, automatic generation of hypotheses, integration of multimodal data, key concepts operationalization, symbolization and digitalization of sociological discourse, framing and clustering of knowledge, visualization methods in the representation of explanatory procedures, relational analysis of meanings, symbolic processing of natural language and others.Prospects of the study. Digital sociology makes it possible to study the patterns of human behavior in connection with much larger forms of conditionality than it was previously: both in real conditions, real time, and in various conditions of virtuality, both in the form of an event and in the forms of intention, action or even emotion.