Programming as Social Science - new methods network

Phillip Brooker is a Research Associate at the University of Bath working in social media analytics, with a particular interest in the exploration of research methodologies to support the emerging field. His background is in sociology, drawing especially on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, science and technology studies, computer-supported cooperative work and human-computer interaction. Phillip has previously contributed to the development of Chorus (www.chorusanalytics.co.uk), a Twitter data collection and visualisation suite. He currently works on CuRAtOR (Challenging online feaR And OtheRing), and interdisciplinary project focusing on how "cultures of fear" are propagated through online "othering".

Digital data and computational methods are increasingly becoming consolidated as essential elements of social science research and teaching. However, the algorithmic processes through which digital data are extracted, processed and visualised are often ‘black boxed’ and obscured from researchers who use those tools, which hinders our understanding of how they might be handled methodologically. Hence, there is an already-high and ever-increasing need for social scientists to engage with computational tools as a “critical technical practice” (Agre, 1997). In other words, since we are now pretty much completely reliant on software as part of our everyday research and teaching practices, it is all the more important that we were able to unpick and interrogate how these software packages operate, in order to better account for our data and research practices!

To this end, myself and Jonathan Gray (both at the University of Bath) have set up a mailing list/network called “Programming as Social Science (PaSS)”, for researchers interested in software programming both as an object of study and as a tool that we can learn and use within social science research. Here, we’re capitalising on lots of good work that has already been done in fields such as Science and Technology Studies, New Media Studies, Social Media Analytics, Software Studies, Ethnomethodology, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, and so on. All of these fields (and many more we haven’t listed!) have contributions to make in regard to understanding how we might critically leverage programming skills as part of social science teaching and research. So the PaSS mailing list/network has been established to act as a (low-traffic) hub for discussing these kinds of ideas, as well as sharing resources, updates, announcements and initiatives around programming in the context of social research.

If you’d like to join in, you can sign up via the following link: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/PaSS. Please feel free to invite anyone and share widely; the computer geek in me is very much looking forward to chatting about programming as part of my work!