Keynote speech at the Digitale Praxen conference at Frankfurt University
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4 misunderstandings about digital methods Tommaso Venturini
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Transcript of Keynote speech at the Digitale Praxen conference at Frankfurt University
4misunderstandings
about digital methods
Tommaso Venturini
4+1 misunderstandings
0. [ Digital mediation traces society ]
1. Digital traces are not sociological data
2. Quantity is less interesting that variety
3. Digital does not mean automatic
4. More quantification demands more qualification
M. 0 Digital mediation traces
society
The media as (just) an
object of study
Photo credit – Brandon Doran via Flickr - ©
The media as carbon
paperChris Harrison, 2004
Internet connections
The rise of
digital methods
Virtual reality
Late ‘80-early ‘90 (Barlow, Turkle, Negroponte, Rheingold)
Virtual society?
1997-2002 (Steve Woolgar et al.)
Digital
traceability
Once you can get information as bores, bytes, modem,
sockets, cables and so on, you have actually a more material
way of looking at what happens in Society.
Virtual Society thus, is not a thing of the future, it’s the
materialisation, the traceability of society. It renders visible
because of the obsessive necessity of materialising
information into cables, into data.
Latour, B. 1998
“Thought Experiments in Social Science: from
the Social Contract to Virtual Society”
From digital
traceability …
Bruno Latour (1998), argued that the Web is mainly of importance
to social science insofar as it makes possible new types of
descriptions of social life. According to Latour, the social integration
of the Web constitutes an event for social science because the
social link becomes traceable in this medium. Thus, social relations
are established in a tangible form as a material network
connection. We take Latour’s claim of the tangibility of the social as
a point of departure in our search (p. 342).
Rogers, R., and Marres, N. 2002
“Frenchs candals on the Web, and on the streets:
A small experiment in stretching the limits of reported reality.”
Asian Journal of Social Science 66: 339-353.
The rise of
digital methods
Virtual reality
Late ‘80-early ‘90 (Barlow, Turkle, Negroponte, Rheingold)
Virtual society?
1997-2002 (Steve Woolgar et al.)
Digital methods
2009 (Richard Rogers)
https://soundcloud.com/mit-cmsw/richard-
rogers-digital-methods
Hansel, Gretel
and the breadcrumbs birds
Drawing credit – Frits Ahlefeldt
Media acceleration
[Media] amplify or accelerate existing processes.
For the "message" of any medium or technology is the
change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into
human affairs.
The railway did not introduce movement or transportation or
wheel or road into human society, but it accelerated and
enlarged the scale of previous human functions, creating
totally new kinds of cities and new kinds of work and leisure.
Mcluhan, M. 1964
Understanding Media
M. 1 Digital traces are not
sociological data
Tracing collective life is not cheaper
(the price is paid elsewhere)
Cable industry investments (cumulative unadjusted data
source: www.ncta.com)
Cable industry investments
(de-inflated rate
source: www.techdirt.com)
Digital traces
are second-handedAskitas, N., & Zimmermann, K. (2011).
Health and Well-Being in the Crisis. IZA Discussion Paper
Digital traces
are second-handed
http://googlesystem.blogspot.fr/2008/08/google-suggest-enabled-by-default.html
Digital traces
are second-handed
Are we mapping the
media or the content? http://contropedia.net
E. Borra, E. Weltevrede, P. Ciuccarelli, A. Kaltenbrunner, D. Laniado,
G. Magni, M. Mauri, R. Rogers, T. Venturini.
Societal Controversies in Wikipedia Articles
CHI'15: 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings, 2015.
Redistribution of
research methods
• Methods as usual (ex. Andrew Abbott, )
The techniques used by digital platforms have been long used in social
sciences.
• Big methods (ex. Newman et al, 2007)
Digital traceability increases the quantity of social data thereby demanding use
of mathematical techniques of analysis.
• Virtual methods (ex. Christine Hine, 2000, 2005)
Digital media transform the quality of social practices and demand therefore
increased efforts of observations and interpretation.
• Platform repurposing (ex. Richard Rogers, 2009)
Digital platforms have their own methods that need to be understood and re-
purposed for social research.
• Re-mediation of sociological methods (ex. Nortje Marres, 2011)
The techniques used by digital platforms have been long used in social
sciences, but are radically transformed the new context of their use.
Marres, N. (2011).
Re-distributing Methods:
Interventions in Digital Social Research.
More redistribution
Less redistribution
On digital traceability
Venturini, Tommaso, and Bruno Latour. 2010.
“The Social Fabric: Digital Traces and Quali-Quantitative Methods.”
in Proceedings of Future En Seine 2009. Paris, pp. 87–101
Venturini, Tommaso. 2012.
“Building on Faults: How to Represent Controversies with Digital Methods.”
in Public Understanding of Science 21(7):796–812.
Venturini, Tommaso, and Daniele Guido. 2012.
“Once Upon a Text : An ANT Tale in Text Analysis.”
in Sociologica 3.
M. 2 Quantity is less interesting
that variety
Taking “data mining”
seriouslyconventional oil VS
unconventional oil
Compulsive hoarding
A good
map of the Web http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/visuel/2012/02/02/car
tographie-de-la-blogosphere-politique-en-
2012_1635269_823448.html
A good
map of the Web http://www.lemonde.fr/politique/visuel/2012/02/02/car
tographie-de-la-blogosphere-politique-en-
2012_1635269_823448.html
And back to big datahttp://linkfluence.com/en/products/radarly/
Quantity VS diversityPatrick Blanc
Quantity VS diversity
https://twitter.com http://www.iisd.ca/vol12/
Quantity VS diversity
http://climatetalkslive.org/ http://climaps.eu/
M. 3 Digital does not mean
automatic
Finding a needle in a needlestak
Drawing credit – Frits Ahlefeldt
This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every
other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from
linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why
people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with
unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves…
Petabytes allow us to say: ‘‘Correlation is enough.’’ We can stop looking for models. We
can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the
numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical
algorithms find patterns.
Chris Anderson
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory
The end of theory?
No, its not just
pushing a button
Terms identification
Terms extraction http://medialab.sciences-
po.fr/publications/misunderstandings/table-1
Term cleaning http://62.210.188.24/negociations/web_cop_si
mpler2new.html
Term merging http://medialab.sciences-
po.fr/publications/misunderstandings/table-2
Co-occurrence http://medialab.sciences-
po.fr/publications/misunderstandings/figure-1
Time analysis http://medialab.sciences-
po.fr/publications/misunderstandings/figure-7
Narrationhttp://climaps.eu/#!/narrative/mitigation-and-
adaptation-in-the-unfccc-debates
Venturini, Tommaso et al. 2014.
“Three Maps and Three Misunderstandings:
A Digital Mapping of Climate Diplomacy.”
in Big Data & Society 1(2).
Venturini, T. et al. 2014
Climaps by EMAPS in 2 Pages
(A Summary For Policymakers and Busy People in General).
in SSRNDecember 2, 2014.
If you want to know more
M. 4 More quantification demands
more qualification
Where size
does matter http://linkfluence.com/en/products/radarly/
(Collective) life
is complicated Andreas Gursky 1999
Chicago, Board of Trade II
Situating VS aggregating
The quali/quantitative divide
poor data on large population
extensive data
intensive datarich data on small population
Follow the White Rabbit
why controversy mapping (and digital methods) will
change everything you know about sociology
Tommaso Venturini
The strabismus
of social sciences
Photo credit – tarout_sun via Flickr - ©
Situating and aggregatingArmin Linke
Inside / Outside
On datascape navigation
Latour, Bruno, Pablo Jensen, Tommaso Venturini,
Sébastian Grauwin and Dominique Boullier, 2012.
“‘The Whole Is Always Smaller than Its Parts’:
A Digital Test of Gabriel Tardes’ Monads.”
The British Journal of Sociology 63(4), pp. 590–615
Venturini, Tommaso, Pablo Jensen, and Bruno Latour (forthcoming),
“Fill in the Gap. A New Alliance for Social and Natural Sciences.”
Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulations.
The micro/macro divide
Merian & Jonston 1718 Folio
Ants, Clony, Nest, Insects
Thomas Hobbes, 1651
The Leviathan
Visual network analysis
Venturini, T. (2010).
Diving in magma: how to explore controversies with actor-network theory.
in Public Understanding of Science, 19(3), 258–273.
Jacomy, M., Venturini, T., Heymann, S. & Bastian, M. (2014)
ForceAtlas2, a Continuous Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization
Designed for the Gephi Software.
PlosONE, 9:6
Venturini, T., Jacomy, M and De Carvalho Pereira, D. (working paper)
Visual Network Analysis: The example of the rio+20 online debate
Beyond micro/macro
http://www.tommasoventurini.it/
