Data Theory. Simon Lindgren

p. 6).

As pointed out by Hargittai and Sandvig (2015, p. 11), the innovations, experimentations, and renegotiations that we see within the area of digital methods are ideally examples of what historian of science Derek J. de Solla Price (1986, p. 246) has called instruments of revelation. When discussing the scientific revolution historically, he argued that its dominant driving force had been ‘the use of a series of instruments of revelation that expanded the explicandum of science in many and almost fortuitous directions’. He also wrote of the importance of ‘the social forces binding the amateurs together’. So, in the case of digital social research, we are now at that stage: a point where researchers often act like curiously experimenting enthusiasts – ‘amateurs’ – in testing and devising new ‘instruments of revelation’.