用日志数据和大模型构建个人生命轨迹的文本档案，兼顾深度与规模。
The Book of Life approach: Enabling richness and scale for life course research
- 将复杂日志数据转化为多维度、跨时间的个人生命文本档案
- 基于荷兰全国注册数据生成超1亿份生命故事，覆盖多种生活领域
- 开源工具包，适合社会学、行为科学等领域的学者使用
百年来，生命历程研究面临定性方法（数据丰富但样本小）与定量调查（样本大但信息浅）的两难。如今，复杂日志数据的兴起与大语言模型（LLM）的文本模式识别能力，使融合二者成为可能。本文提出一种灵活流程，将复杂日志数据转化为个体在多个生活领域、跨时间、具社会语境的文本化生命轨迹，称为“生命之书”。我们利用荷兰全国尺度注册数据，成功生成超过1亿份生命之书，涵盖多种生活维度。相关工具包BOLT已开源，欢迎学界探索其在社会科学中的广泛应用。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
For over a century, life course researchers have faced a choice between two dominant methodological approaches: qualitative methods that analyze rich data but are constrained to small samples, and quantitative survey-based methods that study larger populations but sacrifice data richness for scale. Two recent technological developments now enable us to imagine a hybrid approach that combines some of the depth of the qualitative approach with the scale of quantitative methods. The first development is the steady rise of ''complex log data,'' behavioral data that is logged for purposes other than research but that can be repurposed to construct rich accounts of people's lives. The second is the emergence of large language models (LLMs) with exceptional pattern recognition capabilities on plain text. In this paper, we take a necessary step toward creating this hybrid approach by developing a flexible procedure to transform complex log data into a textual representation of an individual's life trajectory across multiple domains, over time, and in context. We call this data representation a ''book of life.'' We illustrate the feasibility of our approach by writing over 100 million books of life covering many different facets of life, over time and placed in social context using Dutch population-scale registry data. We open source the book of life toolkit (BOLT), and invite the research community to explore the many potential applications of this approach.
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