Mar 24
It has been a wonderful two days of workshops. I would really like to reiterate my thanks to David Beer and Roger Burrows for all their work in making the event so enjoyable. I feel I have learned an awful lot. In the final session I tried to review some of the common themes. We have an unprecedented range of possibilities to re-imagine research.
I think we also need to be more confident about articulating the sensibilities that make up the researcher's craft. This morning I scribbled some notes about how this might be characterised while sitting in a cafe opposite King's Manor.
This kind of sensibility is committed to fostering imagination beyond existing parameters. To think beyond the confines of what is currently thinkable or possible. Secondly, it is the training of an attentiveness not only confined to the predominant lines of sight, the focal points of public concern or attention. What's within the broader depth of field? What we see very often effects what we can imagine. A different attention fosters a wider sense of imaginative possibilities.
The third part of the researcher's craft is to measure and weight data. This is particularly relevant in a digital age and more than the conventional understanding of validity. Rather it focuses on how methods make the social in the moment of representing it. This is applicable to all forms of information including academic knowledge.
Finally, ethical judgement is at the centre of research craft, not just a matter of simply seeking and getting past the "ethics committee". Research ethics is on-going practice. In a way social research has been inhibited and regulated through a kind of ethical hypochondria. One of the things that is exciting about vernacular sociology is that it isn't confined by ethical concerns. Nonetheless ethics as an on-going reflective practice and conversation may be one of the key distinctive qualities within this sensibility.
Described in these terms, research craft is not just a method or technique but a sensibility.
Mar 24
There are ordinary forms of sociology going on in everyday life that we need to think about. Howard Becker's Telling About Society offers some clues about how we might expand the representational repertoires - or ways of telling - available to sociology or social research. The sociological imagination is everywhere in popular culture - The Wire, celebrity gossip, social experiment 'Tv Beauty and the Geeks' - but it isn't admissible in sociology.
What part can sociology play when so many accounts of social life that are informed by a sociological imagination are in public circulation outside of academic sociology. Mosaic, a free app for iPhone, enables profiling that can portray social attributes within postcodes, leading to an elaborate form of commercialisation of sociology. Ignoring these developments is a mistake. We need to think about how we might respond to the dense sociological narratives found across popular culture.
Mar 24
Last.fm is a social network for music listening. People use Last.fm from a business perspective of recommendations - what gigs are going on, new releases you might like.
Sociologically there are interesting things you can do with this. You can analyse the way in which public reactions to celebrity deaths effects music consumption.
You can also do really interesting work on music genre and taste. This opens new possibilities for the sociology of culture. It complicates the debate about cultural omnivores and transcends the debate about qual/quant. This is not a cultural sociology that relies on what people say they are doing but an archive of what they do, how the consumers tag, organise and understand what they are consuming. It has the capacity also to really understand change. You can gauge here the ways in which consumers are making decisions. It also enables the researcher to move through different scales of analysis - from the micro to the macro. You can get quite sophisticated ways of sampling specific sub-groups internationally. It is a self-organised archive of culture. Methods create focal points, we are not so good at focusing on the peripheral. Cultural capital goes metric. Les Back suggested this is like "participant quantification". Mark said that this isn't quite right but you don't need the researcher. The population of Last.fm are ordering their tastes and consumption. You can also see this operating on real time.
Mar 23
One of the problems with on-line surveys is that they are by definition skewed in favour of the middle and upper-classes. Completing surveys is an exercise in cultural capital. Mike argued that data doesn't just reflect social relations but it performs.
Mar 23
Part of the promise of Real Time Research is the possibility of the simultaneity in research. This can be done collaboratively in real time producing a pluralization of observers. We tried to do a exercise in group observation in our last workshop. What we didn't do was enable researchers to be in dialogue with each other. We could have done this.
The danger is that such techniques produce too much information. We are bombarded with information. Part of this process can be managed through crowd sourcing of information and a way of establishing trusted sources. Who can evaluate it. This is the model whereby wikipedia works. Using open source software like Ushshidi and SwiftRiver provides a way to sort and organise data. This kind of material - immediately produced data - raises issues of the ethics of using data. The other dimension of real time research is that the vast range of real time produced data can then be recovered.
Mar 23
Visual features can be collated from a vast range of images on the Internet. This enabled us to sort from millions of images and their associations and labels. This enables the possibility of not only understanding the distribution of images on the Internet but also the parts of the image.
Mar 23
An example of how the images are drawn.
Mar 23
Gaia argued that social research has historically been on the side of the readers and researchers rather than the participants. By the time the analysis has been completed it is no longer an accurate reflection of the lives portrayed. It is actually not for the participants even though they are ostensibly the subjects of the work. It is not useful to the participants, the temporality of research methods is against them. The Social Mirror method being developed at the RSA is trying to tip the balance back towards the participants. The participant's social networks can be represented back to the participants on a tablet almost immediately. There is another dimension here too. The process of drawing and noting social networks may also make participants reflect critically on their life in a potentially transformative way. The reflection in the mirror is enhanced and changed as a result. Gaia said reflecting on the damage social class does in Britain society as a relative outsider: "middle-class people think they make things happen in the world but for working-class people the world happens to them". This offers another way to think about the potential value and impact of digital research methods for those people who allow researchers to share their time.
Mar 23
YouTube allows applications programming interface (api) data to be downloaded. In this way we can get a sense of the web of relationships and debate controversies in YouTube.
In this way we can do interesting content analysis as well develop a complex sense of the networks of sentiment amongst those people watching YouTube videos.
Mar 23
The level of consistency of judgement in SentiStrength is about the level of consistency achieved by humans. Mike Thelwall said that, using SentiStrength, 259 million tweets were analysed in an hour. It would take a human being a month to evaluate a 1,000 texts at an hour a day.
