  Social sciences were built from comparison methods assembling field works and
data, either quantitative or qualitative. Big Data offers new opportunities to
extend this requirement to build commensurable data sets. The paper tells the
story of the two previous quantification eras (census and polls) in order to
demonstrate the need for a new agency to be considered as the target of this
new generation of social sciences: that of objects as Actor Network Theory
proposed and of replications that propagate all over the digital networks. The
case study of Latour's topofil of Boa Vista is revisited to explore how a
qualitative method dedicated to comparison and an Actor Network Theory approach
extended in a replication theory may offer new insights from any field study
and may use the digital ressources to do so.
