For the last few years, I’ve taken to talking about digital social science. I mean this partly as a short-hand to refer to a whole range of (sub)disciplines and (sub)fields which have emerged in response to the challenge of ‘the digital’: data science, computational social science, web science, internet studies, digital […]
As anyone reading this blog regularly will be aware, I’m very interested in the dynamics of discipline formation and the implications they have for the capacity of the social sciences to respond to changing circumstances. There are a variety of mechanisms which emerge from organised knowledge production and operate to […]
I’ve long been fascinated by how rarely qualitative researchers talk about the equipment they use in their research. I love it when I see exceptions to these trend, such as Les Back’s chapter in this volume, because they highlight the tools of the trade in a way conducive to discussions about […]
At the end of last week, I attended a really thought provoking workshop at Bath university on Digital Qualitative Research. It was organised by Phil Brooker and Dina Vasileiou, both based at Bath, inviting a really interestingly diverse range of people (theorists, qualitative researchers, commercial social researchers, computer scientists, HCI researchers […]
This section of The Black Box Society, by Frank Pasquale, expresses why it’s so crucial that practitioners of digital social science cultivate reflexivity. This issue cuts across methodology, research ethics and politics: it’s not simply a narrowly technical issue. From pg 41: Continuing unease about black box scoring reflects long-standing […]
I find this argument from loc 270 of Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution extremely compelling. It reminds me of Roy Bhaskar’s argument about the fetishisation of facts from his Reclaiming Reality. This is what Kitchin says: Moreover, just as we think of bricks and mortar as simple building blocks rather […]
This is a wonderful account by Felicity Callard and Des Fitzgerald, in their new book on interdisciplinarity, concerning the radical restructuring of academic labour that is currently underway within the university. I’ve come at this from a different angle, specifically the implications of data science for the social sciences, but […]
Two interesting things I read yesterday which are feeding into my short article on digital capitalism and digital social science: The radical potential of the Digital Humanities: The most challenging computing problem is the interrogation of power Fill in the Gap. A New Alliance for Social and Natural Sciences I’m interested […]
I’m just finishing off this Frank Pasquale paper I began reading yesterday. I really can’t recommend it enough. I particularly liked this passage on what I’m describing as the kind of digital social science that digital capitalism is encouraging: There is something even more disturbing than the lack of consent […]
An interesting set of distinctions from this great Frank Pasquale paper: Beneath the surface of Internet policy disputes, there is a deeper, even ontological set of orientations to technology. On one side are advocates of “mastery,” who try to resurrect old legal principles and public values to order cyberspace. On […]
I’ve often seen venn diagrams like this one offered to account for the influences shaping computational social science and data science: I’d like to look at a similar question but the other way round. If we assemble Digital Humanities, Digital Sociology, Digital Geography, Social Informatics and Software Studies then what are we likely to find […]
Data, data everywhere. With faster computers and cheaper storage, bigger data sets are becoming superabundant. Social media is a key source of big data in the form of user and system generated content. What do we do with all of the social data and how do we make sense of […]
Digital Methodologies: Beyond Big & Small Data Session Proposal for 9th International Conference on Social Science Methodology (RC33) September 11th – 16th, 2016, University of Leicester (http://www.le.ac.uk/) Session Organizer Christian Bokhove, University of Southampton, United Kingdom, C.Bokhove@soton.ac.uk Mark Carrigan, University of Warwick, United Kingdom, mark@markcarrigan.net Sarah Lewthwaite, University of Southampton, […]
I’ve just published a great piece on The Sociological Review blog, by Sage’s Ziyad Marar, which really resonates with some of the concerns shaping my new project: Yet our digital culture may exacerbate this problem by tilting us even further toward speed, simplicity and utility. In what is often called […]
The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and Big Data & Society (BD&S) intend to award a prize of CHF 1,000 for the best essay on the topic ‘Influence and Power’. This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field. The […]
Call for papers: Themed Issue Qualitative Methods and Data in Digital Societies Qualitative Research [html: http://qrj.sagepub.com%5D Edited by William Housley (Cardiff University), Bella Dicks (Cardiff University) and Karen Henwood (Cardiff University). The explosion of digital social data in recent years has required a response from both the social science and computational […]
The Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) and Big Data & Society (BD&S) intend to award a prize of CHF 1,000 for the best essay on the topic ‘Influence and Power’. This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field. The […]
It’s far from the most sophisticated argument I’ve heard made to this end, but I appreciate the spiritedness with which David Lyon defends the necessity of digital sociology in his Liquid Surveillance book with Zygmunt Bauman pg 34: Sociology is now obliged to come to terms with the digital, or […]
