Digital Methods in Social Science
Digital data as well as methods relating to the collection and analysis of digital data in social sciences are under constant change. On the one hand, digital platforms, practices and systems constantly produce new data. On the other hand, old materials are being digitalized. These transformations emerge in the field of research methods in at least three ways. First, one aim is to apply traditional methods to the study of digital environments. Second, new methods are being developed with a device-centric approach by utilizing the affordances and practices of the digital platforms, called for example ‘natively digital’ methods (Rogers 2019) or interface methods (Marres & Gerlitz 2016). Third, several researchers and research projects aim to combine quantitative and qualitative methods to get a more holistic picture of the digital data sets and phenomena under study (e.g, Laaksonen et al., 2017). These methodological trajectories raise various epistemological and ethical issues, as well as related questions about what societal phenomena can be used by researchers to collect, acquire and process data and thereby produce knowledge.
Here we introduce a few books, journals etc. that address these questions.
Books & book chapters
Bonacich, P., & Lu, P. (2012). Introduction to mathematical sociology. Princeton University Press. (Helka)
Cioffi-Revilla, C. (2014). Introduction to computational social science: Principles and applications. Springer. (Helka)
Es, Karin van; Coombs, Nicolás López & Boeschoten, Thomas (2017). Towards a Reflexive Digital Data Analysis. In Mirko Tobias Schäfer & Karin van Es (eds.) The Datafied Society. Studying Culture through Data. Amsterdam University Press.
Ignatow, G., & Mihalcea, R. (2018). An introduction to text mining: Research design, data collection and analysis. Sage Publications. (Helka)
Laaksonen, S-M. (2021). Sosiaalinen media tutkimusaineistona. In Vuori, J (Ed.) Laadullisen tutkimuksen verkkokäsikirja. Tampere: Yhteiskuntatieteellinen tietoarkisto (online)
Laaksonen, Salla-Maaria; Matikainen, Janne, & Tikka, Minttu (Eds.) (2013). Otteita verkosta. Verkon ja sosiaalisen median tutkimusmenetelmät. Tampere: Vastapaino. (Helka)
Lindgren, S. (2020). Data theory: Interpretive sociology and computational methods. Polity. (Helka)
Newman, M. (2018). Networks (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press. (Helka)
Salganik, M. J. (2018). Bit by bit: Social research in the digital age. Princeton University Press. (Helka)
Sloan, Luke & Quan-Haase, Anabel (2017). The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods. London: SAGE Publications Ltd. (Helka)
Rogers, Richard (2019). Doing Digital Methods. London: Sage. (Helka)
Articles
DiMaggio, P. (2015). Adapting computational text analysis to social science (and vice versa). Big Data & Society, 2(2), 205395171560290. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951715602908
DiMaggio, P., Nag, M., & Blei, D. (2013). Exploiting affinities between topic modeling and the sociological perspective on culture: Application to newspaper coverage of U.S. government arts funding. Poetics,41(6), 570–606. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2013.08.004
Ignatow, G. (2016). Theoretical Foundations for Digital Text Analysis. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 46(1), 104–120. https://doi.org/10.1111/jtsb.12086
Laaksonen, S. M., Nelimarkka, M., Tuokko, M., Marttila, M., Kekkonen, A., & Villi, M. (2017). Working the fields of big data: Using big-data-augmented online ethnography to study candidate–candidate interaction at election time. Journal of Information Technology and Politics, 14(2), 110–131. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2016.1266981
Laver, M., Benoit, K., & Garry, J. (2003). Extracting Policy Positions from Political Texts Using Words as Data. The American Political Science Review, 97(2), 311–331.
Marres, Noortje & Gerlitz, C. (2016). Interface methods: Renegotiating relations between digital social research, STS and sociology. Sociological Review, 64(1), 21–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954X.12314
Perriam, Jessamy, Birkbak, Andreas & Freeman, Andy (2020) Digital methods in a post-API environment, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 23:3, 277-290, DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2019.1682840
Pink, Sarah; Ruckenstein, Minna; Willim, Robert & Duque, Melisa (2018). Broken data: Conceptualising data in an emerging world. Big Data & Society 5:1, 1–13.
Venturini, Tommaso; Bounegru, Liliana; Gray, Jonathan & Rogers, Richard (2018). A Reality Check(-list) for Digital Methods. New Media & Society 20:11, 4195–4217.
Journals
Information, Communication & Society