Social Data Science Xennials
This chapter explores the tensions between analogue and digital methods in a processual way, placing social data science within the genealogy of the long-term disciplinary relations between phenomenological sociology, expertise in computer science associa
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Social Data Science Xennials
Abstract This chapter explores the tensions between analogue and digital methods in a processual way, placing social data science within the genealogy of the long-term disciplinary relations between phenomenological sociology, expertise in computer science associated with digitalisation and the narrative positivism linked with the use of statistics in social research. Focusing on what endures as well as on what changes, it discusses the theoretical, epistemological and ontological sensibilities that are involved in a commitment to digital data analysis. Referring to the ESRC Digital Social Research programme and to more recent work by the Alan Turing Institute Interest Group in Social Data Science, it acknowledges a UK-centric take on Social Data Science. Keywords Social Data Science • Digital sociology • Digital social research • Computational social science Xennials are the demographic cohorts born in the late 1970s to early 1980s that are described as having had an analogue childhood and a digital adulthood. In this book, I want to use this neologism as a metaphor to describe the intellectual biography of social research scholars who were academically “born” before the data deluge (Anderson 2008), when social science was still analogue, and then adapted to the digital “revolution” in research methods. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 G. M. Campagnolo, Social Data Science Xennials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60358-8_1
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G. M. CAMPAGNOLO
As many other Xennials, I started my academic education when Apple entered the consumer portable market and completed it just before big data emerged as a buzzword. As such, I take pride in having been able to undertake social research before and after internet-generated data became a regular appearance in the research design of social research projects and PhD dissertations. By using the term Xennials, I do not mean literally that the experience of moving between analogue and digital social research should be seen a prerogative of the micro-generation born exactly between 1977 and 1983. There are illustrious examples of more senior scholars who also personify research agendas that are grounded in long-standing sociological interests and have subsequently turned to consider the adoption of computational methods in addition to established social research methods.1 There have been many ways to explore the tension between analogue and digital methods (see Beaulieu 2016 for a review) but none of them explore this in a processual way. The purpose of this book is to explore the tension between analogue and digital as part of an evolving research programme and to explore the sequencing of methods within it. The book also responds to a growing demand to place digital research more organically in the context of existing ways of doing social science (Savage 2015: 297). Quoting C. Wright Mills—an author highly regarded by digital research scholars (see Edwards et al. 2013; Savage 2015)—with this bo
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