Computational Social Science and Digital Methods:Rethinking the Study of Society in India's Data Age

Abstract

Somewhere between the last census and the next one, India quietly became a country that leaves a digital footprint before it leaves almost anything else on paper. This paper takes that fact seriously. It offers a humanised, evidence-grounded overview of computational social science (CSS) and digital methods for scholars and students attending ICCSDM‑26, tracing the field's conceptual origins, its explosive but institutionally uneven growth, and the methodological toolkit — web scraping, natural language processing, social network analysis, and agent-based modelling — that now sits alongside the interview and the questionnaire. Drawing on recent secondary data, the paper shows that India closed 2025 with roughly 1.03 billion internet users (70.0 per cent penetration) and around 500 million social media “user identities,” even as 440 million people, disproportionately rural, older, and female, remained offline. Read together with global data-volume estimates — some 173–182 zettabytes generated in 2025 alone — these figures make the case that computational methods are no longer optional for social research, but they also expose a quiet danger: a discipline that studies only what is digitised risks mistaking the loudest, most connected fraction of society for society itself. The paper closes by arguing for a grounded computational social science — one that treats big data as a companion to fieldwork and doctrinal-legal method, not a replacement for either, particularly in a linguistically and socially plural country like India.