September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

Hacking Digital Social Science for the Age of Datafication

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

ABSTRACT

The ongoing and intensifying datafication of our societies poses huge challenges as well as opportunities for social science to rethink core elements of its research enterprise. Prominently, there is a pressing need to move beyond the long-standing qualitative/quantitative divide. This paper is an argument towards developing a critical science of data, by bringing together the interpretive theoretical and ethical sensibilities of social science with the predictive and prognostic powers of data science and computational methods. I argue that the renegotiation of theories and research methods that must be made in order for them to be more relevant and useful, can be fruitfully understood through the metaphor of hacking social science: developing creative ways of exploiting existing tools in alternative and unexpected ways to solve problems.

https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.6

Source: https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.6

Tagged: digital social science, crictical science of data

Christian Fuchs

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

What is Critical Digital Social Research? Five Reflections on the Study of Digital Society

Christian Fuchs

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

ABSTRACT

The creation of the Journal of Digital Social Research (JDSR) is an opportunity to ask: What is critical digital social research? What is the status of digital social research today? The contribution points out five reflections on the status of digital social research. These five observations focus on 1) diamond open access, 2) the theme of digital media & society, 3) critical digital methods, 4) critical digital theory & philosophy, 5) international and global digital research. These five dimensions form important foundations of critical digital social research.

https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.7

Source: https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.7

Tagged: Digital social research

Rebekah Tromble

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

In Search of Meaning: Why We Still Don't Know What Digital Data Represent

Rebekah Tromble

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

ABSTRACT

In the early years, researchers greeted the internet and digital data with almost wide- eyed wonder and excitement. The opportunities provided by digital media such as websites, bulletin boards, and blogs—and later by social media platforms and mobile apps—seemed nearly endless, and researchers were suddenly awash in data. The bounty was so great that it required new methods for processing, organizing, and analysis. Yet in all the excitement, it seems that the digital research community largely lost sight of something fundamental: a sense of what all these data actually represent. In this essay, I argue that moving forward, researchers need to take a critical look into, be more open about, and develop better approaches for drawing inferences and larger meaning from digital data. I suggest that we need to more closely interrogate what these data represent in at least two senses: statistical and contextual. In the former instance I call for much greater modesty in digital social research. In the latter, I call for heuristic models that permit bolder, more robust comparisons throughout our work.

https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.8

Source: https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.8

Tagged: Digital social research, data, heuristics

Tim Jordan

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

Doing Digital Social (And Cultural and Media) Research: What Stays the Same When Everything Changes?

Tim Jordan

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

ABSTRACT

Research into digital sociality often encounters, both in academic and non-academic contexts, the claim that there is no point doing such research because the technologies being examined change so fast that analysis can never keep up. This article criticises any such claim. First, the article examines three kinds of 'sameness' that span the introduction of different technologies: internet-based text communication, digital platforms and information as a non-rival good. In each of these contexts this article explores how looking at what changes rapidly draws attention from forms of social power that stay the same across technologies. This article then argues from this examination that it is key to examine both differences and sameness when researching digital sociality.

https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.9

Source: https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.9

Tagged: Digital social research, sameness, social power

Crystal Abidin

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

Tacit Labours of Digital Social Research as an Early Career Researcher

Crystal Abidin

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

ABSTRACT

Consider this essay as two brief confessions on the pressures of conducting ‘digital social research’ as an Early Career Researcher. Specifically, the confessions call out two emergent norms in academia: that early career digital social researchers ought to be visible and trackable online, and that we ought to focus on novel and innovative phenomena pioneered by ‘the youngs’. These two expectations have insidiously been integrated into early career digital social researchers’ repertoires of ‘tacit labours’ – “a collective practice of work that is understated and under-visibilized from being so thoroughly rehearsed that it appears as effortless and subconscious.” (Abidin 2016, p. 10) – in that it is assumed that being ‘Extremely Online’ and ‘Young <tm>’ are generational literacies ‘naturally’ hardwired into our systems.

https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.10

Source: https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.10

Tagged: Digital social research, tacit labours

Nick Couldry

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

What’s at Stake in Digital Social Research?

Nick Couldry

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

ABSTRACT

I am a social researcher who uses both theoretical and empirical enquiry not so much to describe the social as to understand the conflicts involved in constructing an order that appears to us as ‘social’. I seek to address the paradox of doing social research: for the social is not something concrete at which we can point, but a dimension of how whatever in our life is concrete holds together as a world. Media are crucial to what hangs together as a world – and in ways that much social research to this day still ignores. Media are in the contemporary era irrevocably ‘digital’: they take forms that automatically bring possibilities for recombination, retransmission, and reworking by multiple actors. As such, and unavoidably, digital media can be woven tight into the fabric of social life much more than previous media. But what does this mean for the social world, that is, for our possibilities to enhance or undermine how we live together today?

https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.11

Source: https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.11

Tagged: Digital social research, digital media

Jenny Ungbha Korn

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

#IfTheyGunnedMeDown: How Ethics, Gender, and Race Intersect When Researching Race and Racism on Tumblr

Jenny Ungbha Korn

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

ABSTRACT

Challenges related to digital social research have centered upon protection of the participants whose activity online create the data sets used for study. Ethical issues related to digital participant protection include how researchers interact with research participants. Some researchers argue that particular sites online should be considered “public,” and as a public site of study, that type of digital research does not require participant permission to study. More recently, there has been a push from some editors to researchers to contact individuals to obtain their permission to be studied, even for areas online that might have been regarded as public. In this essay, I share how ethics, gender, and race intersect when researching race and racism on Tumblr through #IfTheyGunnedMeDown.

https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.12

Source: https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.12

Tagged: Digital social research, research ethics

Sarah Pink

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

Digital Social Futures Research

Sarah Pink

September 10, 2019

Vol. 1: No. 1: 2019

ABSTRACT

Social research is almost inevitably digital: in its subject matter because the digital, social and material dimensions of our worlds and lives are now inseparably entangled; and in its methods as our research techniques and encounters are, even if indirectly, implicated with digital technologies, platforms and practices. Social scientific renderings of digital technologies and media and everyday life propose a range of discipline-specific ways of understanding this relationship between the online/offline and digital/material, and a large and growing literature about digital methods and practice for research and its dissemination. The new challenge is to advance from this strong base of critical research and scholarship within the social sciences and humanities, in two ways. First towards interdisciplinary interventions that will bring theory, methods and concepts into dialogue with technology and design disciplines, and policy and industry agendas; and second to engage with emerging digital technologies and communication, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning, and Automated Decision Making (ADM), and the new socialities, everyday life practices and business models associated with these technological possibilities.

https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.13

Source: https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v1i1.13

Tagged: Digital social research, emerging technologies