Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to intervene in debates about the digital and in particular framings that imagine the digital in terms of epochal shifts or as redefining life. Instead, drawing on recent developments in digital methods, we explore the lively, productive and performative qualities of the digital by attending to the specificities of digital devices and how they interact, and sometimes compete, with older devices and their capacity to mobilise and materialise social and other relations. In doing so, our aim is to explore the implications of digital devices and data for reassembling social science methods or what we call the social science apparatuses that assemble digital devices and data to 'know' the social and other relations. Building on recent work at CReSC on the Social Life of Methods, we recommend a genealogical approach that is alive to the ways in which digital devices are simultaneously shaped by the social world, and can in turn become agents that shape that world. This calls for attending to the specificities of digital devices themselves, how they are varied and composed of diverse socio-technical arrangements, and are enrolled in the creation of new knowledge spaces, institutions and actors. Rather than exploring what large-scale changes can be revealed and understood through the digital, we argue for explorations of how digital devices themselves are materially implicated in the production and performance of contemporary sociality. To that end we offer nine propositions about the implications of digital data and devices and argue that these demand rethinking the theoretical assumptions of social science methods to take into account the following:

Speaking with things: encoded researchers, social data, and other posthuman concoctions

“…The notion of data as a fire object is amplified when we consider digital data. Indeed, Ruppert, Law, and Savage (2013) refer to the 'liveliness' of digital data. What is digital data?…”

“…We draw on Actor Network Theory (ANT), phenomenology, and other approaches undergirding human-technology studies and posthuman theorizing to intervene, as Ruppert, Law, and Savage (2013) suggest, in ongoing debates about the digital as an epochal shift, by instead bringing attention to the specificities of the changes inaugurated by the digital.…”

Shifting metaphors in direct-to-consumer genetic testing: from genes as information to genes as big data

“…The promise of big data is argued to be that digital devices enable the collection of previously unforeseen quantities of naturally occurring data, such as clicks, which are not marred by researcher bias (Kitchin, 2014). Second, big data supposedly renders theories obsolete, as the sheer quantity of data can reveal correlations, which emerge straight out of data (Kitchin, 2014;Ruppert, Law, & Savage, 2013). This aspect of big data is encapsulated in the slogan "correlation is everything" proclaimed by Chris Anderson, former editor in chief at Wired magazine (Anderson, 2008), and big data is seen as capable of revealing surprising correlations between diverse or heterogenous data (Kitchin, 2014;Ruppert et al, 2013).…”

“…Second, big data supposedly renders theories obsolete, as the sheer quantity of data can reveal correlations, which emerge straight out of data (Kitchin, 2014;Ruppert, Law, & Savage, 2013). This aspect of big data is encapsulated in the slogan "correlation is everything" proclaimed by Chris Anderson, former editor in chief at Wired magazine (Anderson, 2008), and big data is seen as capable of revealing surprising correlations between diverse or heterogenous data (Kitchin, 2014;Ruppert et al, 2013). The third alleged feature of big data are that it can be interpreted by anyone with tools available online, yielding to multiple interpretations (Ruppert et al, 2013).…”

“…This contextualisation allows me to pinpoint continuities between the two apparently quite different companies in that the way in which both of them represented genes was underpinned by the metaphor of transmission of information, whereby genes code for risk of disease, which can be deciphered by scientists and mitigated by lifestyle change or targeted drugs. However, 23andMe also mobilised the metaphor of big data to render genes a natural or raw digital resource, which could be circulated, shared and taken up by devices across numerous sites transcending institutional boundaries (Ruppert et al, 2013) to legitimise its construction of a private biobank with over a million DNA samples and customers.…”