Analysis of human migration is a very important topic that can improve the life of millions of people who are currently migrating due to difficult environmental or political contexts. Migration research covers a wide area of disciplines and is typically performed using various data types such as census data, registries and surveys, collected by governmental institutions and national statistics offices. These data suffer from a set of limitations related to time and space resolution, that makes analysis of a cross-border phenomenon such as migration far from straight-forward.

Social big data have been proposed to fill some of the gaps and complement traditional data types. Approaches have started to appear, and they promise to enable the construction of new migration-related indices that can provide better time and space resolution. Analysis is difficult here as well, as big data may suffer from selection bias and other issues. It remains to be seen how these data will actually fill the gaps in traditional data, and whether they will open new avenues for migration research.

This workshop aims to enable the sharing of experiences with big data and migration among an interdisciplinary set of researchers and audience. We want to bring together not only researchers from academia, but also from institutions working with migration, and industry. The overall objective is to understand better what are the plausible areas of study where big data can make a difference, and what are the methodologies employed to date.

The workshop is part of recently funded European project “HumMingBird: Enhanced migration measures from a multidimensional perspective”.