Digital Data Revolution and the New Horizons of Population Studies
The digital era,driven by the advancements in internet communication and artificial intelligence,has revolutionized the production study and its usage of data,which is resulting in an explosion of available data and reshaping social sciences through the data revolution,marking a transition from designed data(the past)to trace data(the present)and further onto generative data(the future).Tracing data,encompassing the data from electronic archives,device-sensed,and network platform,offer great advantages over traditional design data in terms of timeliness,scale,scope,and cost,and thus unlocks substantial potentialities for innovation in population studies.Tracing data can significantly advances the study of population migration dynamics,providing rich insights for micro-level demographic analyses by enhancing the mobility measurements,collecting the background information of demographic behaviors,and capturing the targeted subject.Methodologically,tracing data changes the analysis units of population dynamics by altering the time scale,breaks the bottleneck of living place separating from the registered place by the digital dynamic data of spatial dimensions,and brings about the integration of diverse data sources to enhance research validity.In practical terms,tracing data facilitates real-time monitoring and early warning of population and social dynamics and provides timely and effective research support for evidence-based decision-making.This new era of digital data requires more efforts to explore the great potentiality of tracing data application in population studies by leveraging the data imagination,applying the cutting-edge computational methods,fostering inter-disciplinary collaboration,and establishing a modernized data ecosystem for the open,shared,and effective data utilizatio.
Digital trace dataPopulation studiesComputational social scienceGenerative AI data
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
维普
