Trace of pace,place, and space in personal relationships: The chronogeometrics of studying relationships at scale

The study of personal relationships has traditionally relied on self‐reports or observations of face‐to‐face interaction. Digital media increasingly provide the ability to trace communication and relationships at scale. Such methods portend significant theoretical and methodological challenges, as well as potential. As a way of illustrating such potential, big data approaches to the select traditional relational concepts of routine relating, propinquity, homophily, small world, and reciprocity are reviewed. The fields of communication and personal relationships will need to inform such research by developing their own interdisciplinary relationships with geographic information sciences, computational linguistics, and computer sciences or cede a significant frontier of their field to these other disciplines.