Developments in computational and information technology have opened up significant possibilities for analysts of politics and for political actors that cannot be ignored. For analysts, mining “big data,” examining massive amounts of text, and applying computer-based network analysis tools permit eliciting information about interactions that has been impossible to acquire before. This opens up the possibility of better understanding the processes by which political actors create and recreate their worlds through collaboration, competition, and conflict with one another. These new analytical techniques bring two strengths to social science research. First, they promote clear specification of analytical routines, one of the positive results of the increasing discussion of methods in my home discipline of political science. Second, they permit treating particular expressions, choices, and actions in the context of simultaneous activity or interaction among other actors. Acknowledging and tracing the influence of behavior in context will yield scholarship more revealing of the political world. For political actors, computers, information technology, and digital media provide possibilities for effective coordination and cooperation but also another set of weapons in the ongoing struggles between centralizers and decentralizers, rulers and ruled, totalizers and pluralists. The political actor uses are more directly relevant to my own research, which continues to focus on the institutionalized processes by which intergovernmental organizations, transgovernmental networks, and transnational advocacy coalitions affect contemporary global governance, the implications of technological change for particular international regimes, and the ethics that should guide scientists and engineers as they pursue their specialized work and provide expertise for policy making, implementation, and review in a globalized world.
