I don't think it's a matter of whether a certain project falls under the CSS nomer depending on the scale of the data and methods employed, but that there is as

I don't think it's a matter of whether a certain project falls under the CSS nomer depending on the scale of the data and methods employed, but that there is as much 'sociality' to computation as there is 'science', and that studying both social and computational aspects of contemporary society and their interactions can broach insights into the 'digital stack' modern life is folded into. I gathered the quote is not about Habermas and feature selection per se, but a platitude about bridging theory and practice--both social and computational theories and practices. Knowing when, for instance, not to divvy up social features that may constitute a larger (digital) public, or conversly combining/throwing away features that may in fact constitute multiple publics or subject groupings, paves the way for building more accurate or generalisable computational social science models. Why would we want such models? Perhaps to map 'hunches' about social life that were previously only in the realm of rhetoric or simply too difficult to map before the advent of large scale data collection and computation.