{"id":354,"date":"2010-04-17T15:15:20","date_gmt":"2010-04-17T19:15:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/?p=354"},"modified":"2011-07-29T22:53:26","modified_gmt":"2011-07-30T02:53:26","slug":"future-social-science-on-and-with-digital-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/niftyc\/archives\/354","title":{"rendered":"Future Social Science On and With Digital Media"},"content":{"rendered":"

(or: Now I’m a video blogger [sort of]<\/strong>)<\/p>\n

Here are my notes from our session at HASTAC 2010<\/a>. \u00a0It was a pleasure to convene a virtual panel “there” this weekend with Alison Powell, Richard Rogers, Bod\u00f3 Bal\u00e1zs, and David Phillips. \u00a0The whole thing is online (as a set of linked YouTube shorts, organized here<\/a>). \u00a0These notes include notes on what I said and what everyone else said.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

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Future Social Science On and With Digital Media<\/strong><\/p>\n

Saturday, April 17, 2010 —\u00a06:15 – 6:45 p.m. — location:\u00a0cyberspace? (heh.)<\/span>
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\n<\/span><\/strong>ABSTRACT<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

What it means to study society is profoundly changing as we are increasingly surrounded by and incorporated into a pervasive network of digital media (Lazer et al, 2009).\u00a0 In this panel, five scholars will comment for five minutes each on emerging research problems, opportunities, and methods in social science both with and about digital media.\u00a0 Topics will include computational (or e-) social science, new forms and genres of social media, new methods and tactics, legal obstacles to transformative research, and challenges for future graduate education in the social sciences.<\/p>\n

Here are the notes…<\/p>\n

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Christian Sandvig:<\/h1>\n

The Internet is on the verge of blowing up all of our methods courses<\/strong><\/p>\n

[Note to blog readers: \u00a0This is a slightly modified version of my earlier blog post with this title<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

Our methods courses are basically organized around procedure. You could say that\u2019s what research methods are — procedure \u2013 a set of steps that everyone follows. We need to have a more wide ranging discussion about research design \u2013 our methods education at this moment needs to produce students who are capable of inventing their own procedure<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Favorite books on research methods is by Webb Campbell Schwartz and Sechrest, and it is called Unobtrusive Measures. It is a social science classic from 1966.<\/p>\n

Webb et al make the point that what we call research is done at the outcroppings where theory matches instrumentation<\/strong>. You could say the match between theory and instrumentation is the small slice of overlap in a venn diagram.<\/p>\n

We have some set of questions interests and problems yet only a little bit of information is susceptible to research at any given time. Even though instrumentation keeps expanding our reach, still we are looking at the top of an island and guessing at the mountain range that is under the sea.<\/p>\n

But now the venn diagram has exploded. The sea has been drained. All of my metaphors have failed<\/strong>. Thanks to ubiquitous digital media we have stores of data we never dreamed of and entirely new modes of research have opened up for us.<\/p>\n

Inspiration for this HASTAC panel was an editorial in the journal Science titled \u201cLife in the Network<\/a>” (Lazer et al, 2009). \u00a0The editorial makes the case for a new kind of social science to emerge as the result of advances in information and communication technology.<\/p>\n

One of them is that this future social science is already occurring —<\/p>\n

\u201ccomputational social science is occurring, and on a large scale, in places like Google, Yahoo, and the National Security Agency<\/strong>…Computational social science could easily become the almost exclusive domain of private companies and government agencies\u201d<\/p>\n

One way to attack this is to start doing new social science ourselves.<\/p>\n

BUT fallacies and assumptions fill our methods courses now.<\/p>\n