Recent advances in technology have made the use of large, passively collected data common in computational social science. As a postdoc, I have worked on studying human behavior in a wide variety of domains using digital traces and cultural artifacts, and will discuss some of my work in this talk. In particular, I will discuss using call detail records to study the link between internal migration and mobile communication patterns; obtaining the relationship between sentiment and word co-occurrence in political tweets; and characterizing changes in word usage to study book structure.