December 13th-14th, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge In recent discussions of capitalism, the notion of the ‘platform’ has come to play a prominent role in conceptualising our present circumstances and imagining our potential futures. There are criticisms which can be raised of the platform-as-metaphor, however we believe it provides a […]
March 8th, 2018 9:30am to 5:00pm Wellcome Collection, London After last year’s successful ‘Introduction to tools for social media research’, the SRA and #NSMNSS are teaming up again to deliver this one-day conference. As social media research matures as a discipline, and methodological and ethical concerns are being addressed, focus […]
From this interesting interview with Phil Gorski on The Imminent Frame: That would certainly be a hope of mine, and it’s something that I’ve been thinking about a great deal lately, whether there’s a limited kind of moral realism that we could defend, and that we might actually be able […]
From Gabriella Coleman’s Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy loc 4085. I think understanding this “pervasive cottage industry” is necessary if we are to analyse the present circumstances of the social sciences under digital capitalism, as well as their future prospects and problems: There is a pervasive cottage industry (in the form […]
Ahead of the visit by Nicholas Christakis to the UK next month, the Times Higher Education has run an interesting article by Amanda Goodall and Andrew Oswald. I wrote a response to the original article by Christakis that sparked this debate (in fairness he didn’t choose the title) arguing that the problem with […]
Extension of deadline for abstract submission until June 15, 2014. Could you please circulate. CONFERENCE TITLE: PLUNGING INTO TURMOIL: SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE CRISIS Organization: Political Observatory (www.observatoriopolitico.pt), Assistant Professor Isabel David, (School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lisbon) and PhD Candidate André Saramago (Aberystwyth University) Conference Date: […]
COMPUTATIONAL SOCIAL SCIENCE CONFERENCEWed 11 – Fri 13 June 2014, University of Warwick, UKhttp://compsocsci.eu/The increasing availability of large quantities of human behavioural data has drawn the interest of researchers across the social sciences, the natural sciences and engineering. This conference aims to bring together this interdisciplinary community to share perspectives and identify […]
(see here for context) Thanks for the thoughtful response and apologies for what seems to have been a slightly shrill note to my comments in retrospect. I wasn’t consciously commenting with a sociological hat on (so to speak) but I take the point nonetheless – the implication of MacIntyre’s work […]
Earlier this week, it was reported in a number of outlets that Tesco has been using armbands to monitor employees at a distribution center, enabling management to track moment to moment activity in a way which was previously impossible: The armbands, officially known as Motorola arm-mounted terminals, look like something between […]
Though it is a hugely exciting trend, the growth of digital research methods risks becoming a narrow specialism. It is crucial that we don’t fall into the digital dualist trap of assuming that ‘online’ and ‘offline’ constitute distinct realities, as doing so profoundly misrepresents both the ‘real’ and the ‘virtual’. […]
A podcast I did with Eric Jensen for the Sociology@Warwick blog.
I just came across some hastily scribbled notes I made from a crowded public debate about the future of the university last October. I thought I’d post them up here to entrench them in my memory simply because these barely legible scrawls actually encapsulate my views on this much more […]
