How can concepts of ethology be applied to large-scale digital data?

The ethological approach is used to study naturally occurring behavior. In the modern world, many such behaviors are connected to, and recorded by, a wide array of digital services (e.g., social networking, information search, closed-circuit television). How can ethological concepts be applied to help us characterize the environment in which humans live? What aspects of the ethological approach can guide us to obtain measures captured directly from digital data generated by our everyday activities? What kinds of models do we need to understand how human behaviors/activities can be inferred from the physical and built environment? This chapter explores the bidirectional nature of these relationships; namely, how individuals create their environment, and how the environment shapes the individual. It discusses how to proceed from observation and data sampling to knowledge extraction and causal inference. The complementary nature of common and specific are addressed as well as the challenge of integrating niches at both physical and social levels. Finally, all these concepts and associated methods are illustrated through a hypothetical study.