Abstract
Social data is the computable data footprint of user participation in social media. It is produced through the far-reaching standardization of social interaction that allows users to perform daily and en masse hyper-stylized activities such as ‘tagging’, ‘following’ or ‘liking’. The data thus produced are piled up and processed. The outputs of these operations (e.g. similarity, popularity or trending scores) are carried back to users in the form of personalized suggestions, embedded into platform functioning and shared with third parties through APIs and other boundary spanning technologies, reinforcing the process through which social interaction is made the engine of social data production. These conditions set social data apart from data generated through automated technologies of data tracking and recording, and outline the distinct nature of the contribution it makes to the developments associated with big data.