IM920
Digital Sociology

20/30 CATS - (10/15 ECTS)

TERM 1

In this module, you’ll study how digital innovation from social media to big data and AI has enabled new ways of knowing and intervening in society. How has this transformed social life and what are the implications for the relations between social research, technology, and society?

Module topic

New forms of computational social research, in the form of behaviour prediction, real-time analytics, emotion detection, and crowd-based data monitoring, are transforming society in profound ways.

Digital transformations have also sparked intense debates about what are the best and most ethical ways of understanding society among scientists, scholars, policy-makers and publics. While some argue that knowing society – from collecting to analysing data and writing up results – can now be delegated to automated systems, others argue that truly understanding social life continues to require active engagement with specific places, people and contexts, today no less than before.

This module will provide an overview of these recent transformations and debates, and offers an advanced introduction to the key societal, methodological and normative issues they raise, such as: Do the sensational claims for a new computational science of society hold up? What are the ethical, social and political implications of the embedding of computational and AI-enabled analytics in society? Which concepts, methods and sensibilities does sociology offer to understand digital transformations of social life?

Module structure

The module will start with 5 lectures that offer an advanced introduction to Digital Sociology for postgraduate students who are new to the field. Each lecture answers a core question of digital sociology: what makes digital technology social? Do we need new methods to study digital social life? How to define and approach publics in digital societies?

During the second half of the course, students will continue exploring these questions in a hands-on way. Supported by seminars and lab sessions, students will experiment with digital research techniques such as the data walk and network narration to create their own digital sociology project. This will enable you to learn by doing how to practice sociology with digital technology in an everyday social environment, namely the street.

Module Convenor - Dr Noortje Marres

Indicative Syllabus

Weeks 1-5: Introduction to Digital Sociology

Week 1: What is Digital Sociology?
Digital innovation has enabled new ways of knowing society. How has this transformed social life, and how is this changing relations between sociology, technology and society?

Week 2: What makes media technologies social?
Digital innovation has given rise to new social technologies such as social media, virtual personal assistants and social robots. What exactly makes digital technologies social? Is it that they are interactive, or that they are embedded in diverse user practices across society, or something else yet?

Week 3: Do we need new methods to understand the digital society?
Digital innovation has spawned an abundance of new methods, from search engine analytics to automated ideology detection and emotion recognition. Social scientists have raised critical questions about some of these methods, with many argueing that the best way forward is to digitise existing social reserch methods, such as focus groups. Are they right?

Week 4: Who participates in the digital society?
Digital innovation is associated with the shift from audience to participation. Others argue that digital innovation has turned participation into a valuable resource that is increasingly being exploited by industry and the state.The session introduces critical and constructive perspectives of these particular digital transformations of social life, and explores the implications for the relations between innovation, the state and society.

Week 5: Are we researching technology or society?
Digital data and digital analytics raise new problems for social research, not least the problem of bias, as many digital algorithms and digital data sets have been shown to represent, affect or empower some segments of populations more than others. This session provides an overview of solutions to problems of bias developed across different disciplines.

READING WEEK

Weeks 7-10: Digital Sociology in Practice

Week 7: Researching digital social life with sensor media
Digitization invites a shift of attention from sociology as ‘finished product’ to sociology as an ‘on-going practice’. This session will introduce a particular approach for undertaking field research in digital societies that rely on so-called sensor media. It also introduces the topic and structure of the group projects.

Week 8: Exploring digital social life through data walks
This session introduces a specific of methods for undertaking field research on digital societies: the data walk. We will review recent case studies in which data walks have been used to investigate the lived enviroments in the digital society. We will then undertake an app-support data walk to explore the presence of Internet of Things and other devices in an nearby outdoor setting.

Week 9: Data mapping: diagramming the digital city
This session is entirely dedicated to group work: analysis of materials and preparation of the final presentation.

Week 10: Issues in Digital Sociology
Digital social research has given rise to a range of ethical and political issues across sociology, computing and society. How do we engage with these issues as part of research practice? The second half of the session is dedicated to the presentation of group projects.

Illustrative Bibliography

Bonikowski, B., & Nelson, L. K. (2022). From ends to means: The promise of computational text analysis for theoretically driven sociological research. Sociological Methods & Research, 51(4), 1469-1483.

Christin, A. (2020). The ethnographer and the algorithm: beyond the black box. Theory and Society, 49(5), 897-918.

Gregory, K. (2021). ‘My life is more valuable than this’: Understanding risk among on-demand food couriers in Edinburgh. Work, Employment and Society, 35(2), 316-331.

Healy, K. (2017) Public Sociology in the Age of Social Media, Perspectives on Politics.

Lazer, D. M., Pentland, A., Watts, D. J., Aral, S., Athey, S., Contractor, N., & Wagner, C. (2020). Computational social science: Obstacles and opportunities. Science, 369 (6507), 1060-1062.

Lupton, Deborah (2013) Digital Sociology. London and New York: Routledge.

Marres, N. (2017) Digital Sociology: the reinvention of social research, Cambridge: Polity.

Marres, N and E. Weltevrede (2012) ‘Scraping the Social? Issues in Live Research,’ Journal of Cultural Economy.

Orton-Johnson, K. (2024). Digital Culture and Society. London and New Dehlli: Sage publications

Osbaldiston, N. (2023). Digital Sociology: The Internet, Social Media, Ethics and Life. Exploring Sociology in the Antipodes: Introduction to Sociology–1st Australian Edition.

Roberge, J., & Castelle, M. (2021). Toward an end-to-end sociology of 21st-century machine learning. The cultural life of machine learning: An incursion into critical AI studies, 1-29

Savage, M. (2015). Sociology and the digital challenge. Innovations in digital research methods, 297-310.

Törnberg, P., & Uitermark, J. (2021). For a heterodox computational social science. Big Data & Society, 8(2), 20539517211047725.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Demonstrate a conceptual and practical understanding of the role of emerging digital technology in the analysis of social phenomena across disciplines;
• Identify and reflect on key methodological, epistemic and normative issues raised by digital infrastructures and practices for social inquiry;
• Evaluate in practical terms the usefulness of digital platforms for the study of sociological phenomena;
• Demonstrate an understanding of how digital devices may reconfigure relations between social science, computing, and society;
• Develop an appreciation of innovative forms of participation and interactivity that digital technologies enable, and the potential of digital culture to transform the relationship between sociology, computing and their audiences.