scholarly journals DATA INQUIRY: METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS ON DATAFICATION IN SOCIAL RESEARCH

Author(s):  
Irina Zakharova

Datafication is widely acknowledged as a process “transforming all things under the sun into a data format” (van Dijck, 2017, p. 11). As data become both objects and instruments of social science, many scholars call for attention to the ways datafication reconfigures scholarly knowledge production, its methodological opportunities, and challenges (Lomborg et al., 2020). This contribution offers a reflection on the interdependence between methodological approaches taken to study datafication and concepts about it, that these approaches provide within the domains of critical data studies and media studies. Expanding on the concept of methods' performativity (Barad, 2007), I apply the notion of methods assemblages: “a continuing process of crafting and enacting necessary boundaries [and relations]" between researchers and all relevant matters (Law, 2004: 144). The key question in the presented study is what kinds of methods assemblages are being applied in current datafication research and what concepts of datafication they produce. 32 expert interviews were conducted with scholars who published empirical work on dataficaiton between 2015 and 2020. Three methods assemblages were developed. Central to distinguishing between methods assemblages are the ways of associating of the involved actors and things. In my analysis the questions of (1) what we are talking about when talking about datafication and (2) kinds of knowledges that researchers were interested in producing can be understood as such ways of associating. The methods assemblages contribute to critical data studies by producing accounts about datafication processes that are in concert with the methods assemblages applied to study these.

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395171875668 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristin Veel

With slogans such as ‘Tell the stories hidden in your data’ ( www.narrativescience.com ) and ‘From data to clear, insightful content – Wordsmith automatically generates narratives on a massive scale that sound like a person crafted each one’ ( www.automatedinsights.com ), a series of companies currently market themselves on the ability to turn data into stories through Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques. The data interpretation and knowledge production process is here automated, while at the same time hailing narrativity as a fundamental human ability of meaning-making. Reading both the marketing rhetoric and the functionality of the automated narrative services through narrative theory allows for a contextualization of the rhetoric flourishing in Big Data discourse. Building upon case material obtained from companies such as Arria NLG, Automated Insights, Narrativa, Narrative Science, and Yseop, this article argues that what might be seen as a ‘re-turn’ of narrative as a form of knowledge production that can make sense of large data sets inscribes itself in – but also rearticulates – an ongoing debate about what narrative entails. Methodological considerations are thus raised on the one hand about the insights to be gained for critical data studies by turning to literary theory, and on the other hand about how automated technologies may inform our understanding of narrative as a faculty of human meaning-making.


Author(s):  
Dra. Dolores Figueroa Romero ◽  
Dra. Araceli Burguete Cal y Mayor

A partir de la descripción de enfoques y procesos de enseñanza de investigación del Diplomado para el Fortalecimiento del Liderazgo de las Mujeres Indígenas, coordinado por la Universidad Indígena Intercultural del Fondo Indígena y el Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social, se desarrollará una reflexión sobre “la etnización” de la investigación social y la producción de conocimiento cultural y políticamente pertinente para el movimiento de mujeres indígenas organizadas en América Latina. En específico, nuestro análisis se centrará en mostrar los escenarios de disputa donde facilitadoras y lideresas se enfrentaron ante el reto de desmontar la colonialidad de la construcción del conocimiento en las dinámicas de enseñanza y procesos de adecuación de métodos de investigación. Las particulares experiencias de conducción del trabajo de campo de las alumnas mostrarán su creatividad al adaptar y adoptar metodologías que les permitieron visibilizar el aporte político de las mujeres indígenas al desarrollo del activismo indígena local.Indigenizing Social Research Methodologies: Training Experience for the Strengthening of Women’s LeadershipAbstractBased on an ethnographic description of the approaches, learning processes and final research products of the Diploma for the Strengthening of Women’s Leadership coordinated by the Indigenous Fund’s Intercultural Indigenous University and the Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology (UII-CIESAS), this essay reflects upon the indigenization of social research and knowledge production designed to meet the cultural and political needs of the indigenous women’s movement in Latin America. Specifically our analysis will focus on showing scenarios of dispute where facilitators and leaders faced the challenge of dismantling the coloniality of the knowledge construction in teaching dynamics and processes of adequacy of research methods. Finally, the students' own fieldwork experiences show their creativity in adapting and adopting methodologies that allowed them to make visible the political contribution of indigenous women to the local indigenous activism.Recibido: 02 de febrero de 2016Aceptado: 30 de mayo de 2017 


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-162
Author(s):  
Christiane Schwab

During the first half of the nineteenth century, the rise of market-oriented periodical publishing correlated with an increasing desire to inspect the modernizing societies. The journalistic pursuit of examining the social world is in a unique way reflected in countless periodical contributions that, especially from the 1830s onwards, depicted social types and behaviours, new professions and technologies, institutions, and cultural routines. By analysing how these “sociographic sketches” proceeded to document and to interpret the manifold manifestations of the social world, this article discusses the interrelationships between epistemic and political shifts, new forms of medialization and the systematization of social research. It thereby focuses on three main areas: the creative appropriation of narratives and motifs of moralistic essayism, the uses of description and contextualization as modes of knowledge, and the adaptation of empirical methods and a scientific terminology. To consider nineteenth-century sociographic journalism as a format between entertainment, art, and science provokes us to narrate intermedial, transnational and interdisciplinary tales of the history of social knowledge production.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 205395172093393
Author(s):  
Mickey Vallee

The COVID-19 pandemic redefines how we think about the body, physiologically and socially. But what does it mean to have and to be a body in the COVID-19 pandemic? The COVID-19 pandemic offers data scholars the unique opportunity, and perhaps obligation, to revisit and reinvent the fundamental concepts of our mediated experiences. The article critiques the data double, a longstanding concept in critical data and media studies, as incompatible with the current public health and social distancing imperative. The data double, instead, is now the presupposition of a new data entity, which will emerge out of a current data shimmer: a long-sustaining transition that blurs the older boundaries of bodies and the social, and establishes new ethical boundaries around the (in)activity and (im)mobility of doing nothing to do something. The data double faces a unique dynamic in the COVID-19 pandemic between boredom and exhaustion. Following the currently simple rule to stay home presents data scholars the opportunity to revisit the meaning of data as something given, a shimmering embodied relationship with data that contributes to the common good in a global health crisis.


2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Hurdley ◽  
Bella Dicks

This article discusses how emergent sensory and multimodal methodologies can work in interaction to produce innovative social enquiry. A juxtaposition of two research projects — an ethnography of corridors and a mixed methods study of multimodal authoring and ‘reading’ practices — opened up this encounter. Sensory ethnography within social research methods aims to create empathetic, experiential ways of knowing participants’ and researchers’ worlds. The linguistic field of multimodality offers a rather different framework for research attending to the visual, material and acoustic textures of participants’ interactions. While both these approaches address the multidimensional character of social worlds, the ‘sensory turn’ centres the sensuous, bodied person — participant, researcher and audience/reader — as the ‘place’ for intimate, affective forms of knowing. In contrast, multimodal knowledge production is premised on multiple analytic gaps — between modes and media, participants and materials, recording and representation. Eliciting the tensions between sensorial closeness and modal distances offers a new space for reflexive research practice and multiple ways of knowing social worlds.


2017 ◽  
pp. 49
Author(s):  
Francisca Fernández Droguett

ResumenEste trabajo tiene como propósito reflexionar sobre la importancia de la observación en la investigación social, cuestionando la idea de que la observación constituye una práctica objetiva neutral. La objetividad responde a una construcción analítica, situada en los marcos de referencia del observador, siendo siempre la observación una interpretación determinada por el contexto de producción de conocimiento, que parte de la realidad pero cuestionándola, convirtiendo el hecho en dato.Palabras clave: Observación, Observación participante, Observación exógena, Observación endógena, Auto-observación.Abstract This essay has the goal of thinking about the importance of the observation in the social research through the critics of the idea that observation constitute a neutral objective practice. The objectivity answers to an analytic construction placed within the reference background of the observer. In this sense, the observation is always an interpretation determined by the context of knowledge production which comes from the reality but questionning it and changing the fact in a piece of information.Key words: Observation, Participant observation, Exogenous observation, Endogenous observation, Self observation.


Author(s):  
Filomena Maggino

In the sphere of social research, one of the principal methodological approaches is that of the survey. In the performance of surveys, statistics play a fundamental role. This publication is intended to highlight this role, with special reference to data analysis, placing the emphasis on the objectives of such analysis, the logic, the procedures necessary to achieve them, and the interpretation of results. The material has been divided into two volumes, which while being independent are also logically connected. The first volume is organised in two sections: the first is designed to provide a synthetic overview of the statistical survey in terms of methods and instruments, while the second describes the principal instruments of statistical analysis which enable a description of the data. The first volume comes complete with a CD with hypertext. The second volume presents the statistical approaches which enable the achievement of specific objectives, seen in terms of data exploration and verification of the results obtained.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aram Sinnreich ◽  
Jesse Gilbert

In this article, we propose a new theoretical lens through which to explore the relationship between sociotechnical artifacts, the messages they convey, and the cultural meanings derived from them. This premise, which we entitle the "carrier wave principle," holds that there is no theoretical limit to the amount and variety of knowledge that may be derived from a given cultural artifact over time. This axiom can be understood as the result of changes in technological regimes and cultural modalities over time and space, and this has been true throughout history. However, continuing exponential growth in the power and ubiquity of computational processing have accelerated this process to the point where new modalities of knowledge production are now available within the course of a human lifetime. We located our analysis at the intersection of several fields of scholarship, including media studies, information science, cultural studies, science and technology studies, and critical data studies. We conclude with an exploration of the carrier wave principle’s real-world consequences and contexts, including implications for privacy, security, identity and subjectivity.


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