On Digital Qualitative Research

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 and software developers) to discuss the challenges entailed by qualitative digital research and to discuss how existing software could be changed or new software developed to meet these needs.

These are the ideas and problems we compiled as a group which structured the subsequent workshop:

These are my scrawled notes on the discussion I had with smaller groups:

We had some fascinating discussions about the necessity of ‘up-skilling social scientists’ for digital research but doing so in a way which avoids lionising and imitating computer science. This raises the obvious question for me though, as to what digital qualitative research is for: what are we seeking to preserve and why? What’s lost if we lose a qualitative perspective in digital social research? My instinct here is to go back to interpretation, to argue for the irreducibility of the interpretive dimension of social life. To go back to a critique of behaviourism and a critique of positivism, both of which are currently being rearticulated in complex and interconnected ways, but to develop these as part of a methodological engagement with the dazzling array of social scientific opportunities that digital research is opening up. Theory should be at the heart of Digital Social Science, but not theory for theory’s sake.

Data Fetishism

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 than elements that are made within factories by companies bound within logistical, financial, legal and market concerns, and are distributed, stored and traded, so we largely do with data. Consequently, when data are the focus of enquiry it is usually to consider, in a largely technical sense, how they should be generated and analysed, or how they can be leveraged into insights and value, rather than to consider the nature of data from a more conceptual and philosophical perspective.

This “conceptual and philosophical perspective” is a necessary, though insufficient, condition for a critical one. Only if we consider the social ontology of digital data does it become possible to reflexively incorporate critique of the originating platforms into the digital social science that those platforms facilitate.

The Shifting Plate Tetonics of the Human Sciences

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 in the last year or so I’ve begun to understand this as part of a much more all encompassing process with radical implications for what scholarship will mean in the 21st century. They describe it much more incisively, as well as artfully, then I have been able to:

The more we wander down strange interdisciplinary tracks, the more apparent it becomes to us that being disciplined isn’t playing it safe: the truth is that staying within the narrow epistemological confines of –for example –mid-twentieth-century sociology, while it may produce short-term gains, is not, in fact, the best way to guarantee a career in the twenty-first century (and we mean ‘career’ in its most capacious sense here: we are not using it with the assumption that everyone wants a permanent post at a university, but to express an idea that many would like to find some way to advance their projects, ideas, and so on). The plate tectonics of the human sciences are shifting: we here describe our own forays into one small, circumscribed niche between the social and natural sciences, but expand this horizon to epigenetics, to the emergence of the human microbiome, to all kinds of translational research in mental health, to ‘big data’ and the devices that append it, to the breakdown of the barrier between creative practices and research, and to a whole host of other collapsing dichotomies, and it becomes apparent that ‘neuro-social science’ is only one local effect of a much broader reverberation.

A lot is up for grabs under these circumstances. The Digital Social Science Forum is a long term project intended to intervene in and shape this terrain.

the two ontological orientations to technology prevalent within digital capitalism

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 the other are adepts of “attunement,” who caution the legal systematizers. When the “masters” propose a new constraint on the network, the “attuners” tend to parry with calls for humility. Law should adapt itself to the emergent order online, they say, should respect its inner music, its patterns of information exchange and hierarchy.

Both mastery and attunement can map to generally “conservative” or “progressive” policy positions. In privacy policy, the “masters” are often progressive, trying to impose some fair information practices on a Wild West of data brokers. The “attuners” are usually “free market” advocates, disciples of Friedrich Hayek who want to see spontaneous order online. Given the importance of intermediaries, attuners can be either privacy advocates (vis-à-vis government) or detractors (with respect to rules for companies). One year, they may press Congress not to force cable companies to track and stop music file-sharing; the next, they may fight for “deregulation” that permits the same companies to degrade quality of service for those deemed pirates by automated detection systems. As corporate media interests strike more deals with intermediaries, the politics of “attunement” have become increasingly neoliberal. The “online order” to which policymakers are told they must adapt is one comprehensively ordered by giant firms.

http://www.iasc-culture.org/THR/THR_article_2015_Spring_Pasquale.php

I’m particularly interested in the final proposition and how this manifests itself in emerging forms of digital social science: the invocation of “online order” naturalises digital capitalism, presenting it as an inexorable reality which is foundational to digital social science, rather than something which can become an object of interrogation and critique through digital social science.

call for proposals: social media & society in london

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 it? How does the use of social media platforms and the data that they generate change us, our organizations, and our society? What are the inherent challenges and issues associated with working with social media data? What obligations do we have as social media researchers to protect the privacy of the users? These are just a few questions that will be explored at the 2016 International Conference on Social Media & Society (@SocMediaConf).

The conference invites original scholarly submissions that build on previous work and critically evaluate the role of social media for social and political change, community engagement, new forms of governance, support of individuals and organizations in domains such as Information and Communication Technologies, Politics, Public Administration, Health, Sports, Journalism, Business Management, Academia, and Marketing (just to mention a few). We welcome both quantitative and qualitative work related to the broad theme of ‘Social Media & Society’ which crosses interdisciplinary boundaries and expands our understanding of the current and future trends in social media research. We are also calling for submissions that develop and apply novel methods and theories to collect, analyze, and visualize social media data as well as those that discuss ethical and privacy implications of using big and small data. All submissions will be peer-reviewed. If selected, the author(s) will be invited to present in person at the conference.

TYPES OF SUBMISSIONS

Please visit the Submission Page for a full description of the submission types and deadlines for Workshops/Technical Tutorials, Panels, Full Papers, Work-in-Progress Papers, and Posters.)

SUBMISSION DEADLINES

Dec 4, 2015: Workshops/Tutorials/Panels
Jan 15, 2016: Full & WIP Papers
Mar 4, 2016: Poster Abstracts

PUBLISHING OPPORTUNITIES

Full papers presented at the conference will be published in the Conference Proceedings by ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (ICPS), subject to conference registration. Selected papers will also be invited to submit their extended full papers to Special Issues of Big Data & Society (BD&S), and American Behavioral Scientist (ABS) published by SAGE Publications.

ABOUT @SOCMEDIACONF

The International Conference on Social Media & Society is an annual gathering of leading social media researchers from around the world. Now, in its 7th year, the 2016 Conference will be held from July 11-13 at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. The conference is organized by the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University, Ted Rogers School of Management. For 2016, we are also delighted to announce that Big Data & Society Journal (BD&S) along with the Centre for Creative & Social Technologies (CAST) at Goldsmiths, University of London will be local co-hosts.

From its inception, the conference has focused on the best practices for studying the impact and implications of social media on society. The conference offers an intensive three-day program comprising of workshops, tutorials, paper presentations, panel discussions, and posters covering wide-ranging topics related to social media research. The conference provides attendees an opportunity to exchange ideas, present their original research, learn about recently completed and work-in-progress studies, and strengthen connections with their peers. Last year’s conference hosted over 200 attendees, featuring research from over 400 scholars across several fields from over 100 institutions in 28 different countries.

HASHTAG:

If you plan to tweet about the conference, please use the hashtag ‘#SMSociety‘. Use this hashtag for any social media research related news that you would like to share with the community as a whole. If you like to include the year, please use the following convention ‘2016 #SMSociety’. (We are switching to this convention in order to promote a lasting sense of community among attendees regardless of the year. Alternatively you can also join our Mailing List to stay up to date.)

TOPIC OF INTERESTS:

Social Media & Big Data
· Data Visualization
· Analytics & Data Mining
· Scalability Issues
· APIs
· Data Curation
· Virality & Memes
· Big and Small Data
· Ethics
· Privacy, Surveillance, & Security

Social Media Impact on Society
· Politics
· Journalism
· Sports
· Health
· Public Administration
· Business (Marketing, PR, HR, Risk Management, etc.)
· Sharing Economy / Crowdsourcing
· Academia (Alternative Metrics, Learning Analytics, etc.)
· Mobile

Theories & Methods
· Qualitative Approaches
· Quantitative Approaches
· Opinion Mining & Sentiment Analysis
· Social Network Analysis
· Theoretical Models

Online/Offline Communities
· Case Studies of Online or Offline Communities
· Trust & Credibility
· Online Community Detection
· Measuring Influence
· Online Identity (Gender, Private Self / Public Self)

call for papers: digital methodologies – beyond big & small data

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, United Kingdom, s.e.lewthwaite@southampton.ac.uk
Richard Wiggins, Institute of Education, United Kingdom r.wiggins@ioe.ac.uk

Session Abstract
In recent years the challenge of Big Data has become a dominant theme within discussions of social science methodology. But these debates have too often been played out within a limited methodological frame of reference, in which the virtues and vices of Big Data are counterpoised or the call is made to supplement Big Data with Small Data. This stream will critically analyse this methodological framing of Big Data, its strengths and limitations, with a view to developing digital methodologies which move beyond Big Data and Small Data. In doing so, we hope the stream will also addressed a broad range of related issues, such as:

The methodological challenge of big data and digital social research
The practical challenges of mixed methods approaches to digital social research
The role of theoretical ideas in digital methodologies
The relationship between Virtual Methods, Digital Methods, Technology Enhanced Methods etc.
The methodological utility of data mining and the dangers of data fishing
The continued utility of sampling in digital social research, for example with regard to collection methods involving Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Twitter streams.
What are the ethical and social implications of linking and accessing administrative data?
What are the implications for epistemologies, data collection and analysis of the pace of change in which social life is increasingly played out online?

The stream seeks to incorporate technical issues pertaining to digital methods into a broader discussion of the impact of digital methodologies. We are particularly keen to receive papers that reflect upon and bridge existing methods and draw out a vision for the future of social science research and practice.

The session is organised jointly between the Independent Social Research Foundation’s Digital Social Science Forum and the International Journal of Social Research Methodology.

DEADLINE: 21st January, 2016

Submission Instructions:

1. To submit a paper abstract for the RC33 9th International Conference on Social Science Methodology, you should visit: http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/sociology/research/rc33-conference After landing on the homepage, navigate to ‘Abstract Submission’, which appears in the top left hand column of the webpage, see image below:

2. Complete the form in full. You may wish to cut and paste your abstract into the Abstract field from another document.

3. Choose the relevant session for your stream. To do so you will need to select the relevant lead session organiser from the drop-down menu highlighted in the image below. To check you are submitting to the correct session, you can view a table of sessions and session convenors by clicking the link entitled ‘View the list of sessions and session convenors’. Once complete, click submit.

digital capitalism and the form of social science it encourages

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 ‘attention economy’ (where information overload makes attention the scarce resource) there is a clear need to filter our consumption efficiently, therefore inviting the twin enticements of automation and aggregation. The hope is that we can navigate the suffusion of information by using big data, algorithms and metrics of many types and thereby cope with the tidal wave of knowledge without drowning.

But this trend favours certain types of information, the more standardised the better, and relies on a metaphor of knowledge as a process of discovery, yielding up simple enough nuggets that will be grist to the mill of aggregation. This is all very well for simpler, tamer problems that are commonly dealt with by physical and natural science. When it comes to messier and more ‘wicked’ problems, which are to a larger extent the focus of social science and the humanities, interpretation is often a more apt mode of enquiry. And the results are usually more ambivalent and need careful digestion and patience and need to be assessed with a multi-dimensional framing

http://www.thesociologicalreview.com/information/blog/the-contested-value-of-social-science-in-a-digital-culture.html

Later on this year, I’m planning a short piece, building on the question of digital capitalism and the form of social science it encourages, discussing digital capitalism and the form of social science it needs. We’re seeing the emergence of a potentially dominant approach to digital social science which contributes to the systematic mystification of the political economy of digital capitalism.

please tell early career scholars: the isrf social media essay competition

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 winner will also be invited to present the work during a special event at Social Media & Society 2016 and will have the conference fee waived and travel costs covered.

Please read these details carefully before submitting your essay for consideration or contacting the Independent Social Research Foundation or Big Data & Society with a query.

The essay will be judged on its originality and independence of thought, its scholarly quality, its potential to challenge received ideas, and the success with which it matches the criteria of the ISRF and BD&S. The successful essay will be intellectually radical, orthogonal to existing debates, and may articulate a strong internal critique across the field of social science in relation to the digital. Its challenge to received ideas will have the potential to provoke a re-thinking of the topic. The ISRF is interested in original research ideas that take new approaches and suggest new solutions, to real world social problems. The full statement of the ISRF’s criteria and goals may be viewed here.

Big Data & Society publishes interdisciplinary work principally in the social sciences, humanities and computing and their intersections with the arts and natural sciences about the implications of Big Data for societies. The Journal’s key purpose is to provide a space for connecting debates about the emerging field of Big Data practices and how they are reconfiguring academic, social, industry, business and government relations, expertise, methods, concepts and knowledge.

The ISRF and BD&S invite submissions from scholars across the social science disciplines, philosophy, and the humanities, whose work has implications for the competition’s theme and falls within the remit of BD&S’s goals. For the purposes of the competition, participants should either be current doctoral students or within three years of being awarded their doctorate.

The submitted essays will be judged and the winning essay will be chosen by an academic panel (the ISRF Essay Prize Committee). The panel’s decision will be final, and no assessments or comments will be made available. The result will be notified to applicants by email during April 2016 and will then be announced by posting on the websites of the ISRF and of BD&S. The ISRF and BD&S reserve the right not to award the prize, and no award will be made if the submitted essays are of insufficient merit.

The winning essay will be accepted for publication in the Journal; the author may be asked to make some revisions before publication. Other applicants may have their submissions accepted for publication in the Early Career Researcher forum of BD&S subject to the Journal’s peer review and decision-making process.

The details and criteria are:

Essay topic: Influence and Power (This is a topic, not a title. Accordingly, authors are free to choose an essay title within this field.)

Eligibility: Participants should either be current doctoral students or within three years of being awarded their doctorate.

Essay length: 5,000 to 7,000 words

Essay format: Follow the BD&S Author Guidelines, available on the BD&S website.

Language: English

Submission deadline: 31 January 2016

Queries:
essayprize2016@isrf.org

Submissions should be made online at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/bdas and authors should indicate that their submission is for the special theme, ‘ISRF Essay Prize.’

call for papers: qualitative methods and data in digital societies

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 science communities. This has been framed as an attempt to move beyond the coming crisis of empirical sociology (Savage and Burrows, 2007, 2009; Edwards et al., 2013; Housley et al., 2014). The opportunities and challenges for social science from this ‘data deluge’ are wide ranging and a spectrum of thinking is emerging across the community that includes enthusiasts, skeptics and those with deep reservations. Yet, the rise of digital data and the claims being made for it also rest on human practices and social life in multiple ways (Dicks, 2012; Smith, 2014). Consequently, Qualitative Research is central to understanding how digital data is accomplished, lived and analysed.

This themed issue invites contributions that address the role of Qualitative Methods in responding, challenging and contributing to the reflexive interrogation and scoping of data in digital societies at situated, networked and system levels. The advent of Web 2.0, the open data movement and the rhetoric of ‘Big Social Data’ have opened up opportunities to analyse big qualitative data streams, such as those associated with social media, in ways that are not yet fully understood; new digital data developments include those associated with the emerging contours of the ‘Quantified Self’ movement and the navigation of health metrics through the use of body proxemic technology giving rise to forms of life characterised by data responsibilisation and self-analytics.

The themed issue will invite papers that report on these and associated developments. Topics of interest include:

Ethnographic studies of interdisciplinary collaboration in the area of digital data analysis, digital tool development, platform development and the associated context(s) of occupational identities and expertise.
The Qualitative dimensions and issues surrounding coding and annotation practices through new methods such as crowdsourcing techniques and citizen social science. Qualitative studies of the social life of methods in the digital era and the observation of ‘naturally occurring’ data generation practices that make use of new networked technologies in the pursuit of self-management and performance. This might also include studies that demonstrate how digital actors reflexively navigate data streams in ways that are nuanced and complex and not akin to being a ‘cultural dope 2.0’.
The interaction order in the digital age; the ‘Self’, identity and digital data.
Methodographic studies of the design and use of algorithms in digital tool development and data harvesting, the examination of code and machine learning as an accomplishment and artefact, the social organisation of statistics and modelling, the examination of demographic proxies in social media analytics and issues surrounding inference and evidence within the Big Social Data imaginary.
The relationship between ‘small’ and ‘big’ social data. Innovations in the Qualitative analysis of Big Text data and social media streams.
The ethical dimensions and politics of data in the digital age. Data inequalities: gender, race, class and the accomplishment of data.

References

Edwards A, Housley W, Williams M, Sloan L, and Williams M (2013) Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: Surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation. International Journal of Social Research Methodology 16(3): 245–260.

Dicks B (2102) (ed.) Digital Qualitative Research Methods: Data Analysis. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Housley W, Procter R, Edwards A, Burnap P, Williams M, Sloan L, Rana O, Morgan J, Voss A and Greenhill A (2014) Big and broad social data and the sociological imagination: a collaborative response. Big Data & Society 1(2): 1–15.

Housley,W. (2015) Focus: The Emerging Contours of Data Science. Discover Society, Issue 23.

Savage M and Burrows R (2007) The coming crisis of empirical sociology. Sociology 41(5): 885–899.

Savage M and Burrows R (2009) Some further reflections on the coming crisis of empirical sociology. Sociology 43(4): 762–772.

Smith, RJ (2014) Missed miracles and mystical connections: Qualitative research, digital social science and big data. Big Data? Qualitative Approaches to Digital Research 13.

Please send an abstract of no more than 250 words to: JonesA7[at]cardiff.ac.uk by 31 December 2015. Abstracts will be reviewed for fit. You will be informed if the article is invited for review. Full manuscripts are due by 1 June 2016.

digital social science essay competition