On the value of Digital Traces for commercial strategy and public policy: Telecommunications data as a case study

Just as information and communication technologies (ICT) and the digital economy are transforming everyday life, so they are transforming our ways of knowing about everyday life. The breadth of social practices that are mediated by digital infrastructure, and thus recorded by digital traces, has not gone unnoticed in the social sciences.1 Coupled with technological and methodologi- cal advances in large-scale data capture, storage, and analysis, transactional data on communication, con- sumption, leisure, health, work, and education are now routinely collected and can, in principle, be employed for a wide range of analyses. Clearly, the increased traceability of social networks can enhance our ability to extract actionable insight by analyzing their form, distribution, and structure through digital media. Consequently, an enormous potential to generate important insights and innovation exists within the social sciences through an improved understand- ing of spatialized social networks (i.e., place-based analyses of social network structures over time). As we will show, these networks have applications in—at the very least—regional development, market research, and infrastructure planning because the structure and spatial distribution of social networks underpins demand (and, consequently, supply or provisioning) as well as provides indicators of well-being, integration, and cohesion.