The Politics of Data (LSE Series) The Philosophy of Data Science (LSE Impact Series) Digital Futures (Discover Society) The Politics of Data (Science) (Discover Society)
Tag: Digital Social Science
Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences: http://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9781137407955 Sustainable Knowledge: A Theory of Interdisciplinarity Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change: Transforming Knowledge and Practice For Our Global Future Metatheory, Interdisciplinarity and Disability Research: A Critical Realist Perspective Interdisciplinarity and Well-Being Employing Philosophical Dialogue in Collaborative Science Localization in Cross-Disciplinary Research: A Philosophical Approach Philosophical intervention and […]
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 craft. However if we have accumulated […]
In a post yesterday, I expressed my discomfort with how Nick Srnicek invokes the notion of data as a raw material in his Platform Capitalism. In a footnote on loc 1102-1121, he offers a Marxist justification for this use: I draw here upon Marx’s definition of raw material: ‘The land (and this, economically speaking, includes […]
This is a well-documented trend in trade publishing. From John Thompson’s Merchants of Culture, pg 267: One is that the publishing industry –the big corporate publishing houses together with the retail chains – have become very good at building brand-name authors and increasing the sales of each new book by the big-name commercial fiction writers, […]
In advance of running my first impact and social media workshop on Tuesday in Ghent, I’ve been working through some of the literature on impact. One book that’s proving more thought-provoking than I expected is Achieving Impact in Research by Pam Denicolo. It’s an edited collection that emerged from a symposium in Warwick in 2012 that I wish […]
From Daniel Rosenberg’s essay in Raw Data Is An Oxymoron, loc 916. What further developments are we beginning to see in the meaning of ‘data’ in a digitalised context? The author’s point is that data is not associated with veracity, such that inaccurate data is still data, but I wonder if I’ve misunderstood this because […]
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 […]
An interesting post by Fabio Rojas on the different ways in which the label ‘computational sociology’ has been used: Statistics – for the baby boomer generation of social scientists, “computing in socioal science” meant applied statistics. Remember, it requires a lot of knowledge and skill to store data and estimate models on computes with limited […]
What a fantastic event: /////PICTURING THE SOCIAL CONFERENCE///// A one-day conference exploring contemporary image sharing on social media & online visual cultures, which aims to create productive dialogue Monday, 20 June 2016 Grand Hall, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester 10:00 – 17:00 In recent years individuals, groups of people, and organisations have become more reliant upon visual […]
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 anxiety about misapplications of natural […]
More info here: http://socialmediaandsociety.org/2016-workshops/workshop-3-conceptual-challenges-interdisciplinary-social-media-research/ Abstract: Many, if not all, affirm the value of interdisciplinary collaboration in social media research, as different disciplinary backgrounds contribute different skills to the analysis of complex socio-technical objects. However such collaborations also entail conceptual challenges, encountered at the level of substantive theoretical commitments but also in terms of taken-for-granted assumptions that inform everyday practice. The […]
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 […]
An astonishing lucid introduction from loc 257 of Rob Kitchin’s The Data Revolution: Data are commonly understood to be the raw material produced by abstracting the world into categories, measures and other representational forms –numbers, characters, symbols, images, sounds, electromagnetic waves, bits –that constitute the building blocks from which information and knowledge are created. Data are […]
A delightfully cynical view about citizen science in Shadow Work, by Craig Lambert, loc 1521-1536. I don’t think I agree with him but I struggle to articulate why exactly. This is a challenge that proponents of citizen science need to be able to answer: NONETHELESS, IF THE work is interesting, some organizations can attract support […]
This is very interesting. It reminds me of Milena Kremakova’s notion of the ‘troll on the bridge’. Much as university leadership can be characterised by ‘Academic Caesars’, who demand internal loyalty in return for shielding their subordinates from the political context, the ‘troll on the bridge’ secures the autonomy of those within a research centre or research […]
This looks so interesting: BIG QUALIDATA: Tackling Analysis of Very Large Volumes of Qualitative Data in Social Science Research Monday 9th May 1-4pm, University of Edinburgh, Manchester and Southampton. Can social researchers scale up techniques of working with qualitative data and meaningfully analyse massively more text than they can possibly read? Our forthcoming seminar will […]
From Mediated Memories, by Jose van Dijck, pg 46-47: Digital objects, such as photographs, are considered by many to be immaterial because digits are invisible and they can be endlessly manipulated until a final format (printed photograph, music CD) “materializes.” However, to understand the digital as immaterial is as erroneous as the idea of analogue […]
I wish I could take part in this – it looks fantastic: Call for Submissions and Registration We would like to invite submissions for the 2016 Social Study of IT Open Research Forum (SSIT ORF) Workshop at the London School of Economics on the 19th of May 2016. Aiming at PhD and junior researchers, this year’s workshop will […]
In recent years, we’ve seen the proliferation of calls to reorientate sociological thought around new concerns, methodologies and approaches that can ground the discipline in changing times. This symposium brings together advocates of prominent approaches with the hope of a dialogue concerning these calls. What do they have in common? How do they differ? Are their […]
