A prospect for the geographical research of sport in the age of Big Data

Abstract

Along with the ever-accelerated update of computer science and techniques, the data-driven ‘computational social science’ has been blooming. But some important questions are: Will this trend bring any changes in sports geographical research? Which challenges will geographers have to encounter? This article briefly reviews the relationship between sport and Big Data before exploring some possible paradigm shifts in the area of sports geography. This article also argues that a new paradigm can have some significant impacts on the directions of research in the area of sports geography. A robust sports geographical study can be achieved by geographers seek to manage ethical, epistemological and methodological challenges in the age of Big Data to provide theoretically and empirically (re)constructed/informed geographical intelligence for modern sport.

Keywords:

• Computational science
• big data
• paradigm shift
• prospects
• sports geography

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to acknowledge two peer reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this research.

Disclosure statement

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Additional information

Funding

This article is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Project No. 17BTY014).