## <span class="censor">Data Studies 2020 // S06</span> <!--image for class--> <img src="https://pablov.me/pres/media/activity.png" width=100%> Pablo Velasco // Information Studies // [pablov.me](https://pablov.me) --- ## Plan for the day: * redistributing (methods) and reassembling (devices) --- **Web social science research (Fielding 2008)** * Digital technologies enable new practices for recording, analyzing, and visualizing social life. <img src="https://hackmd.io/_uploads/HyTFfOn8D.jpg" width="40%"> Optimistic (Latour) and Pesimistic approaches (Savage and Burrows) ---- **Reassembling (Ruppert et al 2013)** * Not what digital devices *reveal*, but how they produce and perform the social * Devices as both: * the *materials* of social life: liveliness of data * the *apparatuses* to know it: material, institutional, and behavioural elements apparatus/assemblage/dispositif <span class="censor">"a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid." (Foucault 1980)</span> ---- BLUE COLOR <!-- .slide: data-background="blue" --> ---- <img src="https://hackmd.io/_uploads/H1yfkOnLw.jpg" width="100%"> Himba tribe color recognition experiment / Namibia (Robertson, Davidoff, Davies, and Shapiro 2006) ---- ### Digital Methods (big umbrella) * Digital methods: “the use of online and digital technologies to collect and analyse research data (Snee et al 2016) * Snee et al include: * web-based surveys (Dillman 2007) * online interviewing and focus groups (Kazmer and Xie 2008) * computer mediated discourse-analysis (Herring 2004) * digital ethnographies e.g. virtual ethnography (HIne 2000) ---- **Redistribution (Marres 2012)** * redistribution of research: not so much an opposition between IT firms and researchers (Savage and Burrows 2007), but a reconfiguration of agents in social research * ~~5~~ **4 views** (along a spectrum): * **methods as usual**: old social methodologies incorporated into digital devices * **big-methods**: vast datasets allow us to perform large-scale analysis on *real* network dynamics** * **virtual methods**: adaptation of the social research methods into the digital * **digital methods**: adapt digital devices for the purposes of social research * digital: a) tools, b) social data, c) platforms ---- #### "Natively digital" methods & objects <span class="censor">The rise of the Internet enables new research methods that deploy specifically digital devices such as links, comments and shares (Rogers 2009; Rogers 2013)</span> * **methods** embedded in online devices: of crawling, scraping, folksonomy * digital **objects**: tweet, username, timestamp, hyperlink, hashtag * built upon existing services #### Spheres (Rogers 2013) 1. mid to late 90s: hyperlink, individual website analysis 2. early to mid 00s: blogosphere, search engine critique 3. late 00s: location-aware, web 2.0, social media **"cross-spherical analysis”: web, blogs, news, twitter, etc** ---- <!-- .slide: data-background-image="https://hackmd.io/_uploads/S15aIYhIv.png" data-background-size="auto 100%" --> --- ## Research project + TCAT ---- <!--.slide: data-background-image="https://hackmd.io/_uploads/ryUO2Vo8v.png" data-background-size="auto 100%"--> # <span style="color:white;font-size:4em">42</span> <span style="color:white" class="fragment">The "Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything" Calculated over a period of 7.5 million years (*The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*)</span> ---- * “O Deep Thought Computer,” he said, “the task we have designed you to perform is this. We want you to tell us...” he paused, “... the Answer!” * “The answer?” said Deep Thought. “The answer to what?” * “Life!” urged Fook. * “The Universe!” said Lunkwill. * “Everything!” they said in chorus. * Deep Thought paused for a moment’s reflection. * “Tricky,” he said finally. (...) * “Forty-two!” yelled Loonquawl. “Is that all you’ve got to show for seven and a half million years’ work?” * “I checked it very thoroughly,” said the computer, “and that quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest with you, is that you’ve never actually known what the question is.” * “But it was the Great Question! The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything!” howled Loonquawl. * “Yes,” said Deep Thought with the air of one who suffers fools gladly, “but what actually is it?” ---- <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-18566-7#change-history" target="_BLANK"><img src="https://hackmd.io/_uploads/ByAvFP2Uv.png" width="100%"></a> ---- ### Research Project (sneak peak) ---- * This is a group project. **It works in a similar way to the mini-projects, but has a longer scope and demands**. * You are expected to **use the TCAT server** as your main anchor for your research project. This will provide you with a considerable amount of data within a relatively constrained topic. * You should also **use other tools and sources seen during the course, and you are free to use your own collected data to compare, contrast or complement your research project**. * You **don’t need to limit yourselves to digital or quantitative data**. The use of non-digital sources (e.g. interviews), and qualitative close reading (e.g. focusing on a sample of comments) is highly encouraged. * **The general topic for the database is climate change**. You have plenty of freedom on what aspect you want to choose to focus in. You can look at actors, language use, perceptions, images, networks, news and media, discursive topics, issues and controversies, etc. * You will have the rest of the term to work on your project. ---- ## TCAT * API based * Built by keywords OR geolocations * Can be thoroughly queried (if you have a complicated query on a big bin, it will take some time) * Different data and formats can be exported from it (depending on the amount of data and the bin size, this process may take some time) TCAT bins 1. **NOMOS**: Names bin (Ds19cc_nomos) (Keywords: "climatechange", "climatecrisis", climateemergency") 3. **GEO**: Aarhus geolocated bin (DS19_cc_GEO_Aarhus) ---- ### Activity for the class: 1. Based on the information you have so far on the research project, brainstorm your (guiding) “What” question(s) with your group. Feel free to ask the instructors for guidance. --- ## [Mini-project 3](https://hackmd.io/@ds20/B1n-QOzLw) <!--DEBRIS * The digitalisation of methods <span class="censor">A focus on the newness of the Internet tends to obscure the extent to which methodological innovation has been a recurrent feature of the social sciences for at least a century (Fielding, 2008)</span> * The re-mediation of methods <span class="censor">Digitization enables the re-fashioning of existing social and cultural research methods (Bolter and Grusin 2000; Marres 2012)</span> #### 2. Digitalisation Newness of methods may lead to distancing users from the aspects of a methodological approach Also, a tendency to adapt offline practice to online contents > Any assesment of Internet methodologies needs to be sober enough to undermine exaggerated claims, but open-minded enough to spot potentiality where it exists (Fielding 2008, 6) #### 3. Re-mediation New visual media achieve their cultural significance by paying homage / rivaling / refashioning earlier media > Remediation did not begin with the introduction of digital media. We can identify the same process throughout the last several hundred years of Western visual representation. A painting by the seventeenth-century artist Pieter Saenredam, a photograph by Edward Weston, and a computer system for virtual reality are different in many important ways, but they are all attempts to achieve immediacy by ignoring or denying the presence of the medium and the act of mediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000, 11) --> <style> .reveal{ font-family:mono; font-size: 25px; } .reveal .censor{ background:black; color:white; } .reveal section img { border:none; } .reveal section left{ width:50%; } </style>