Introduction

We live in an ‘information age’ and an ‘information economy’ (see Sampler, 1998; Boisot, 1998). As argued before by Shapiro and Varian (1999), ‘information rules’ in the age of the internet. Information is available so quickly, ubiquitously and inexpensively that markets, organisations and individuals are now facing the problem of information overload (Shapiro and Varian, 1999). While ‘information’ is a very broad term, information theorists pointed out that information is better understood by conceptually dissecting it as an interaction between information seeking and information sharing (Robson and Robinson, 2015). Either by taking a perspective of information as a medium (for example, storage) or information as a process (for example, communication) the concepts of information seeking and information sharing come into play (Robson and Robinson, 2015).

Much of this information ‘revolution’ has been driven by advancements in technology. Particularly, the adoption of computers and the internet have shaped to a large extent how we seek and share information (Boisot, 1998; Shapiro and Varian, 1999). Information seeking and sharing moved away from paper and happens now online using computers in a transformation process known as digitalisation (Nikou, Brännback and Widén, n.d.; Meyer, Schaupp and Seibt, 2019; Olson and Pollard, 2004). With digitalisation also came a growing availability of digital data in a phenomenon known as ‘big data’.

Evidencing the academic relevance of digitalisation and big data, many journals across disciplines issued special issues on the concepts (for example, Journal of Communication and Social Science Computer Review among others). Furthermore, some renowned academic publishers have also launched new journals devoted to the topic, such as Big Data & Society (SAGE), Big Data Research (Elsevier) and Journal of Big Data (Springer). Digitalisation is now mentioned in the ‘official aims and scope information’ of journals across many disciplines, including sociology, marketing, organisation studies, innovation studies, information science and software engineering. This all points to the need for multidisciplinary research efforts to fix problems that emerge with the digitalisation of information.

Literature review

Digital trace data

Before defining the concept of ‘digital trace data’, it is good to revisit the three characteristics of all trace data as proposed by Howison, Wiggins and Crowston (2011).