Consumer data research

Big Data collected by customer-facing organisations - such as smartphone logs, store loyalty card transactions, smart travel tickets, social media posts, or smart energy meter readings - account for most of the data collected about citizens today. As a result, they are transforming the practice of social science. Consumer Big Data are distinct from conventional social science data not only in their volume, variety and velocity, but also in terms of their provenance and fitness for ever more research purposes. The contributors to this book, all from the Consumer Data Research Centre, provide a first consolidated statement of the enormous potential of consumer data research in the academic, commercial and government sectors - and a timely appraisal of the ways in which consumer data challenge scientific orthodoxies.

Introduction : consumer data research : an overview / Paul Longley, James Cheshire and Alex Singleton -- Part one. Provenance and consumer data infrastructure -- Consumer registers as spatial data infrastructure and their use in migration and residential mobility research / Guy Lansley and Wen Li -- The provenance of customer loyalty card data / Alyson Lloyd, James Cheshire and Martin Squires -- Retail areas and their catchments / Michalis Pavlis and Alex Singleton -- Given and family names as global spatial data infrastructure / Oliver O'Brien and Paul Longley -- Part two. Dynamics and consumer data infrastructures -- Ethnicity and residential segregation / Tian Lan, Jens Kandt and Paul Longley -- Movements in cities: footfall and its spatio-temporal distribution / Roberto Murcio, Balamurugan Soundararaj and Karlo Lugomer -- The geography of online retail behaviour / Alexandros Alexiou, Dean Riddlesden and Alex Singleton -- Smart card data and human mobility / Nilufer Sari Aslam and Tao Cheng -- Interpreting smart meter data of UK domestic energy consumers / Anastasia Ushakova and Roberto Murcio -- Part three. New applications and data linkage -- Geovisualisation of consumer data…