This is a guest-post by David Hales, a fellow associate of the new think-tank, Synthesis, who specialises in computational social science. This is a thoughtful response to the rise in big data, and some of the more outlandish claims made about it – see for example, Chris Anderson’s piece ‘The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete‘. I think there is some real relevance for development approaches to big data here.Almost everything we do these days leaves some kind of data trace in some computer system somewhere. When such data is aggregated into huge databases it is called “Big Data”. It is claimed social science will be transformed