The (un)changing role of the researcher

摘要

The increasing abundance of consumer-driven data has led to the development and adoption of tools that have the ability to mine, aggregate and make sense of (a large proportion of) this information. There is no doubting the opportunities this presents, but what does it mean for the role of the researcher? You might think that the development of technologies such as machine-based learning or text analytics to deal with large, pre-existing data sets would ensure greater impartiality and accuracy by removing researcher bias - by removing the researcher altogether. It would appear that these developments eliminate the need for researchers to form questions, recruit respondents, and ask them about events and feelings that occurred in the past.