Two links that might be of interest.
Firstly, an exhibition at the Open Data Institute is exploring “what it means to be human in a dataverse?”, with digital artists-in-residence presenting works on the theme of interacting with data-dense environments.
Secondly, a tutorial the the recent World Wide Web conference teaches social scientists how to design, plan, implement, and analyse on-line experiments. They make use of a number of tools in which we have expertise within IDIR, including R for statistics: it might need different computational techniques to apply these ideas to really big samples, though.