Social research in the age of a data driven economy and society - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Social research in the age of a data driven economy and society

Социальный компьютинг: основы, технологии развития, социально-гуманитарные эффекты Московский педагогический государственный университет Moscow State Pedagogical University Moscow, 1st December ROBERT MANCHIN, Center for Big Data, Institute for Advanced Studies, Koszeg

Paradigm change in science always related to revolutions in

measurement methods and new tools,

resulting in a opportunities to observe the world differently and answering old questions with new insights

Making sense of the new

• bservations on our complex world

still needs conceptual frameworks to reflect on the explored data

From Pitirim Sorokin to Michael Burawoy … Closer than ever

context: axial period, great acceleration, interaction between physical and social

URAL-II

An observation panel size of 5 billion on reporting the state of global society?

2 examples for new research agendas for social scientists: economy, politics

after manufacturing…

could even highly complex jobs like construction go as well?

AI + algorithms made possible with the exponential growth of computing power:

algorithmic society …changing control functions… the future

• f work is here .. white collar middle class is in danger as well

politics in the age of post-fact world

At which point does society become utterly irrational?

Is it the point at which we start segmenting off into alternate realities? CONSEQUENCE: the first wave of social research based on analysis of social media and news site needs a rethink as well

DANGERS

A drink, anybody?

together with digitalization of economy, society and everyday life: emergence of digital social science; a few examples

• Open data movement create easy access to digitalized history records and process-produced records of

daily activities of institutions

• Linked Open Data tools .. makes context rich social science analysis a reality
• Social network analysis tools and visualization makes the communication of results more accessible
• twitter as a source: follower networks, #hashtag spread, meme research, retweet analysis
• wayback machine: historical developments, linkages
• instagram: visual sociology’s best friend
• iTunes, Spotify, etc. playlists, preferences: sociology of popular culture
• web of science, Google Scholar, Scopus: new scientometrics
• wikipedia: politics of representation, public memory, generation of citizen science, …
• web hyperlinks: issue networks globally, locally, underlying structures…
• Google resources: culturomics, historical sociology, search analysis, …
• etc. etc. etc.

The future PRISM of the Social Scientist: 
 Linked Open Data Cloud

“Linking Open Data cloud diagram, by Richard Cyganiak and Anja Jentzsch. http://lod-cloud.net/”

what it means for the future

• f social research:
• ability to develop more sophisticated, finer grained models of human life
• a shift from
• data-scarce speculations to data-rich studies of societies
• from static snapshots to dynamic, longitudinal analytical frameworks
• from misleading aggregates to high resolution observations
• resolution and variety of data combined with the new analytical techniques,

partially helps the inherent reductionism, promising a more sensitive, nuanced analysis, understanding emergent properties and complex systems

• GOING BACK TO THE BASIC ROOTS OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES —

combination of OBSERVATION + EXPERIMENTATION, allowing for social relevant science

How disruptive the new social science?

• fundamentally altered nature of data, making sense of temporal and spatial

context, looking at social relations and networks instead of isolated individuals…

• the link between data generation - analysis makes possible to ask old and

new questions and answer in new ways

• emergence of new paradigms, further pluralism in approaches, conceptual

and methodological challenges across social sciences and humanities…

• facilitating non-disciplinary research
• BUT NOT WITHOUT raising significant ethical and political questions

Thank you

questions? uAsk from iAsk.hu

address below robert.manchin@iAsk.hu