First, the word Social Genome was used in a letter to the editor submission to Science in response to a seminal article about using big data for social science by King.
The original submission states, “A well-integrated federated data system of administrative databases updated on an ongoing basis could hold a collective representation of our society, our social genome.” Kum and others continue to use the word since 2011, with it being defined in a peer reviewed article in 2013.
[3] It states “Today there is a constant flow of data into, out of, and between ever-larger and ever-more complex databases about people.
Together, these digital traces collectively capture our social genome, the footprints of our society.” In 2014, a vision paper[4] on population informatics was published which further elaborated on the term.
Second, separately at about the same time, a group of researchers led by the Brookings Institution started the Social Genome Project[5] which built a data-rich model to map the pathway to the Middle class by tracing the life course from birth until middle age.