Introductory description

Digital innovation is enabling new ways of knowing society, from online surveillance to behavioural analytics to real-time research. What are the implications of this for the relations between social science, computing and society?
New forms of computational social science have sparked intense debates across disciplines including sociology, computing and media studies in recent years. This course will provide an overview of these debates, and offers an advanced introduction to the key epistemic, methodological and normative issues they raise, such as: Do the sensational claims for a new computational science of society hold up? Do we really need new methods in order to study digital societies? What are the implications of the rise of computational sociology for the relations between social research and social life?

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Wks2-5 Introduction to Digital Sociology

Week 2: What is digital sociology?
Digital innovation enables new ways of knowing society (Savage, Latour, Lazer et al): what are the new objects, methods and platforms of digital social inquiry emerging across disciplines, how are these changing relations between sociology, computing and society?

Week 3: What makes media technologies social?
Digitization has given rise to new social data, technologies and analytics. The session provides an overview of current approaches in social studies of digital media technologies and evaluates the challenges posed by digital sociality today.

Week 4: Are we studying society or technology?
Digital data and analytics raise methodological problems, not least that of digital bias. This session provides an overview of different solutions to this problem developed across disciplines: critical abstraction, performativity, new empiricism.

Week 5: Who is Digital Sociology’s public?
Digital innovation is associated with the shift from audience to participation. The session discusses critical and constructive sociological analysis of this claim, and explores its implications for sociology, computing and their publics.

Wks6-10 Digital Sociology in Practice

Week 6: Introduction to Digital Sociology in Practice
Digitization invites a shift from sociology as ‘finished product’ to ‘on-going practice’. What difference does this make for how we understand the ‘context of application’ of sociology and interact with actors in the field? This session also introduces the topic and structure of the group projects.

Week 7: Method 1: Mapping Issues with Online Methods
This session introduces a specific interdisciplinary methodology, issue mapping online, to clarify how digital sociology engages with social actors, contexts and technologies in practice. Start of group projects (research design).

Week 8: Method 2: Mapping Issues with Mobile
This session presents a second set of methods for mapping issues which students will use in their group projects: app deployment, mapping apps and related mobile methods. Group projects undertake data collection and/or field visits.

Week 9: Groupwork Session
This session is entirely dedicated to group work: analysis of materials and preparation of the final presentation.

Week 10: Issues in Digital Sociology + Student Presentations
Digital social science has spawned a range of ethical and political issues across sociology, computing and society. How do we engage with these issues as part of research practice? The second half of the session is dedicated to the presentation of group projects.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a conceptual and practical understanding of the role of emerging digital technology in the analysis of social phenomena across disciplines;
• Identify and reflect on key methodological, epistemic and normative issues raised by digital infrastructures and practices for social inquiry;
• Evaluate in practical terms the usefulness of digital platforms for the study of sociological phenomena;
• Demonstrate an understanding of how digital devices may reconfigure relations between social science, computing, and society;
• Develop an appreciation of innovative forms of participation and interactivity that digital technologies enable, and the potential of digital culture to transform the relationship between sociology, computing and their audiences.

Indicative reading list

Back, L. (2012). Live sociology: social research and its futures. The Sociological Review, 60(S1), 18-39.

Barry, A., Born, G., & Weszkalnys, G. (2008). Logics of interdisciplinarity. Economy and Society, 37(1), 20-49.
Beer, David, and Roger Burrows. 2013. “Popular Culture, Digital Archives and the New Social Life of Data,” Theory, Culture & Society 30, 4: 47-71.
Burgess, J, A. Galloway, and T. Sauter (2015) Hashtag as Hybrid Forum: The Case of #agchatoz,
N. Rambukkana, Ed. (2015). Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Networked
Discourse. New York: Peter Lang.

Carrigan, M and M Kremakova (2013) Your ‘daily dose of Sociological Imagination’: reflections on social media and public sociology, http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/14861
Couldry, N. Social analytics: towards a phenomenology of the digital world. British Journal of Sociology, forthcoming
Edwards, Adam, et al. "Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: Surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation." International Journal of Social Research Methodology 16.3 (2013): 245-260.
Flyvberg, B. (2001) Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How it Can Succeed Again, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Gerlitz, C., & Helmond, A. (2013). The like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web. New Media & Society, 1461444812472322.
Gillespie, T. & K. Foot et al. (2013) Media Technologies: Materiality, Technology, Society, Cambridge: MIT Press
Gross, Ana (2012), The Economy of Social Data: Exploring Research Ethics as Device, in Adkins L. and Lury C., Measure and Value, Sociological Review Monographs, Willey Blackwell.

Jackson, S. J., Gillespie, T., & Payette, S. (2014). The policy knot: Re-integrating policy, practice and design in social computing. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing (pp. 588-602).

Latour, Bruno et al. (2013) ‘The Whole is Always Smaller Than its Parts: A Digital Test of Gabriel Tarde’s Monads,’ British Journal of Sociology.
Law, J., & Ruppert, E. (2013). The social life of methods: Devices. Journal of Cultural Economy, 6(3), 229-240.
Lazer, D., Kennedy, R., King, G., & Vespignani, A. (2014). The parable of Google Flu: traps in big data analysis. Science, 343(14 March).
Lazer, D., Pentland, A. S., Adamic, L., Aral, S., Barabasi, A. L., Brewer, D., ... & Van Alstyne, M. (2009). Life in the network: the coming age of computational social science. Science (New York, NY), 323(5915), 721.
Lury, C. (2012). Going live: towards an amphibious sociology. The Sociological Review, 60(S1), 184-197.
Lury, C. and N. Wakeford, N. (2011) Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social, Routledge, London.
Lupton, Deborah (2013) Digital Sociology. London and New York: Routledge.
Marres, N. (forthcoming). Digital Sociology: the Re-invention of Social Research. Cambridge: Polity
Marres, N. (2015). Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method. Science, Technology & Human Values, 0162243915574602.
Marres, N and E. Weltevrede (2012) ‘Scraping the Social? Issues in Live Research,’ Journal of Cultural Economy. Available at: http://eprints.gold.ac.uk/6768/.
Munk, A. K. (2014). Mapping Wind Energy Controversies Online: Introduction to Methods and Datasets. Available at SSRN 2595287.
Orton-Johnson, K. and N. Prior (Eds) (2013) Critical Perspectives in Digital Sociology, Palgrave MacMillan, Basingstoke.
Pappachirisi, Z.(Eds) (2015) Social Media + Society, Inaugeral issue, April-June 2015, http://sms.sagepub.com/content/current
Procter, R., Vis, F., & Voss, A. (2013). ‘Reading the riots on Twitter: methodological innovation for the analysis of big data.’ International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16(3), 197-214.
Rogers, R., N. Sánchez-Querubín, A. Kil (2015) Mapping Issues for an Ageing Europe. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Ruppert, E. (2013). Rethinking Empirical Social Sciences. Dialogues in Human Geography 3(3).
Savage, M. and Burrows, R., (2007), ‘The Coming Crisis of Empirical Sociology’, Sociology, (41): 885-899.
Snee, H, Ch. Hine et al (2015) Digital Methods for Social Science An Interdisciplinary Guide to Research
Innovation. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Suchman, L. (2007). Human-machine reconfigurations: Plans and situated actions. Cambridge University Press.
Tinati, Ramine, Susan Halford, Leslie Carr, and Catherine Pope. 2014. Big Data: Methodological Challenges and Approaches for Sociological Analysis. Sociology Online First (18 February).
Uprichard, E. (2013) "Big Data, Little Questions?" Discover Society. Issue 1. Avail. at http://www.discoversociety.org/2013/10/01/focus-big-data-little-questions/

Uprichard, E., Burrows, R., & Byrne, D. (2008). SPSS as an ‘inscription device’: from causality to description? The Sociological Review, 56(4), 606-622.
Venturini, T. (2012). Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. Public Understanding of Science, 21(7), 796-812.
Wouters, P., S. Wyatt & A. Beaulieu (2012). Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and the Social Sciences (pp. 219-250). MIT Press.

Interdisciplinary

The module requires students to engage with, and critically evaluate, debates about digital sociology from a range of disciplinary perspectives.

Subject specific skills

to evaluate in practical terms the usefulness of digital platforms for the study of sociological phenomena;

• to demonstrate an understanding of how digital devices may reconfigure relations between social science, computing, and society;
• to develop an appreciation of innovative forms of participation and interactivity that digital technologies enable, and the potential of digital culture to transform the relationship between sociology, computing and their audiences;
• to critically analyse social concepts implicit in methodological proposals, including those presented as software applications;
• to connect conceptual and practical knowledge about science, technology and society;
• to develop confidence and competence in interdisciplinary debates about sociology and the role of social science in technological societies;
• to demonstrate practical knowledge of a number of digital research tools, for further study, work and citizenship.

Transferable skills

• to evaluate key arguments and positions in social science debates across disciplines;
• to think critically, creatively and independently in relation to literature and assignments;
• to demonstrate time-management skills;
• to demonstrate independent learning skills;
• to participate in class discussions;
• to make productive links between theoretical ideas and practical phenomena;
• to demonstrate written and oral communication skills: to articulate arguments orally and through well-argued essay writing, supported by wide reading and research.