HSSH Project Planner Juho Pääkkönen defended his doctoral dissertation Credibility-building for social science big data on Saturday, 29 November at the University of Helsinki. The dissertation examines how social scientists negotiate the credibility of digital big data and what kinds of conceptions of research emerge through this process.
The opponent was Associate Professor Jacob Habinek from Linköping University, and the custos was Professor Petri Ylikoski from University of Helsinki.
Pääkkönen’s work shows that the challenges of using big data in the social sciences are not merely technical but fundamentally organizational and epistemic. Diverging understandings of acceptable research practices shape how new data sources and computational methods can be adopted. The dissertation includes six research articles and an introduction that explore credibility-building across sociology, the digital humanities, commercial social media analytics, and computational social science.
The dissertation highlights the need for further empirical research on the use of new digital datasets, computational techniques, and emerging AI-based tools in the social sciences. According to Pääkkönen, the implications of these resources cannot be understood without examining how their use is framed, justified, and debated across different research contexts.