Computation and the Sociological Imagination

Abstract

Computational sociology leverages new tools and data sources to expand the scope and scale of sociological inquiry. It’s opening up an exciting frontier for sociologists of every stripe—from theorists and ethnographers to experimentalists and survey researchers. It expands the sociological imagination.

Beyond networks: Aligning qualitative and computational science studies

“…Her proposal is a useful antidote to the careless way in which "much computational social science projects simply go along with whatever ontology, epistemology or methodology is wired in to the platforms, packages or tools they use to capture, analyze and visualize data, without querying whether and how they are appropriate to the research project at hand" (p. 187; see also Cambrosio et al, 2014 for a similar argument). Given that many STS scholars have insisted on reflexivity as a key aspect of their domain, it is actually surprising that this issue has not attracted more widespread attention despite recent calls for a more balanced collaboration between ethnographers and computational sociologists (Evans & Foster, 2019;Goldberg, 2015).…”

Social Computing Unhinged

“…After 2000, the rise of the web and profusion of social life on it turned computational social science to pursue computer-assisted analysis of the explosion of social data becoming available from blogs, social media, social networking and other traces of digital communication [39,40] . For social scientists the social data revolution includes "high throughput" archives, observatories, surveys, and experiments [41] . High throughput emerged as a desiderata of research at the turn of the 21st Century with experiments in drug discovery, genomics, biology, and chemistry that used robotics, advanced data processing and sensitive detectors to rapidly conduct millions of tests, potentially answering many questions simultaneously [42] .…”

Against method: Exploding the boundary between qualitative and quantitative studies of science

“…If we reduce these artifacts into quantities previously theorized, we ignore the vast new views of science uniquely available to us. Emergent patterns in complex data demand qualitative sensibilities to determine a research focus and how to interpret, theorize, and qualify insights (Evans & Foster, 2019;Nelson, 2017). But these skills have been underexercised and undervalued among quantitative researchers.…”