Data and web mining: an introductory overview

Thanks to information and communication technologies the capacity to collect and analyze social data with an unprecedented breadth and depth and scale is being available and is actually largely employed by commercial companies and intelligence services. Social sciences and sociology, in particular, are only marginally concerned with this kind of data. Their concern with them is however an important goal to attain. What is at stake is the access to extraordinary potential sources of relevant information to be re-assembled using all theoretical and methodological expertise developed till now by social scientists. Sociologists have to engage in the effort to develop from that information public relevant knowledge overcoming the self-referential feature which each data source derives from its collecting system device and to open new reflexivity capabilities for democratic social collectivities.