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- Convenors:
-
Paolo Magaudda
(University of Padova)
Attila Bruni (Trento University)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
The track aims at addressing challenges and critical concerns that the raising of digital social life brought to research practices in STS and social sciences at large, thus questioning how the reconfiguration of research tools, methods and techniques reshapes theoretical and empirical research.
Long Abstract:
The increasing digitalization of everyday life (including the prominence of internet-based interactions and the proliferation of social media and digital platforms) is leading to the introduction of new digital tools, techniques and artefacts for data collection and analysis. While a reflexive turn in social research already contributed to problematize the supposed neutrality of the researcher and of the accounts that s/he produces, the same cannot be said in reference to tools, artefacts and techniques today adopted by researchers and research collectives. From a STS perspective, tools, methods and techniques are not just transparent entities, but active elements in building the relationship with the field and in constructing research outcomes. For instance, several new research tools basically rely on old forms of statistical analysis; big data or so called ‘naturally occurring data’ are not ‘natural’ at all, as digital contents are often highly formatted and standardized. This also applies to search engine query data (which depend on the way the search engine itself works), and to software for qualitative analysis (with their own internal logic) or online ethnographies (where the digital infrastructure set the possibilities of observation). In a few words, data generated with digital-based approaches raise much more questions that they aspire to solve.
Accordingly, main topics of interest of this panel include, but are not limited to:
- technical and material infrastructures of social research in today’s digital society;
- challenges and changes in research practices since the adoption of digital-based research tools;
- materialities of digital ethnography, digital methods and software-based analysis;
- experimentations and new research patterns opened by new digital tools and data;
- challenges posed by platforms, social media and other internet-based environments to established methodologies in social sciences;
- critical analysis of the role of digital tools in theoretical and empirical research.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Lorenzo Olivieri (University of Bologna)
Short abstract:
The contribution illustrates the design and testing of a game about migration control. The goal of the game is to involve migrants and other social actors in the problematization of the semantic categories deployed in the data practices and infrastructures for migration management.
Long abstract:
In recent years, methods for challenging, complementing and overcoming traditional ethnographic approaches have received increasing attention. Games, for instance, have been described as powerful tools: they allow to experience, from a first-person perspective, power dynamics and knowledge asymmetries, to empower communities, to probe and explore alternative configurations of everyday activities. My contribution will focus on "My documents, check them out", a collaborative, role playing game which I designed in order to engage migrants, as well as other social actors, in the re-design of the semantic categories used in the databases for migration management. The game simulates some of the temporal and administrative constrains lived by migrants in their encounters with migration control. Furthermore, during the game players are invited to design, from scratch, an application form containing the personal data of their fictional characters. The applications are then uploaded into a software which takes a decision about them.
The game was tested in multiple settings and with unexpected results. For asylum seekers the game worked simultaneously as a learning tool but also as way for remembering and making sense of their experiences with the asylum process. However, the game proved to be a productive ethnographic device even when played by other actors (scholars, students, activists, lawyers). It allowed to reveal their knowledge and familiarity with the issues and dynamics that are re-enacted by the game as well as some of the tacit, implicit biases and assumptions shaping interactions with the bureaucratic mechanisms governing everyday life.
Renée Ridgway (Aarhus University)
Short abstract:
Drawing on a digital ethnography with a group of students, in this presentation I put forth ‘critical feminist screenshotting’, an STS method that visualises the search results of black-boxed algorithms as ‘partial perspectives’ (Haraway 1998), offering an alternative ‘way of (machinic) seeing’.
Long abstract:
‘Ubiquitous googling’ (Ridgway 2021) with keywords is a new media habit (Chun 2016), serving as a window into users’ thoughts, interests and desires. Although Google promotes itself as a neutral purveyor of information (Introna and Nissenbaum 2000), with its commercial search activities it prioritizes results predicated on a variety of factors that are anything but objective or value free (Noble 2018:65). Operating as an ‘increasing invisible information infrastructure’ (Haider & Sundin, 2019), many people cannot tell the difference between paid advertising and ‘organic’ search results, with most users staying above the ‘fold’ (Introna 2016, Lewandowski 2017:22). Transient as well as opaque, what are some of the criteria determining search results and how can they be captured and better understood?
In order to gain insight into how Google’s search ecosystem works, a digital ethnography investigates the ‘personalization’ of search results and whether results differ between people. A feminist lens of analysis exposes the technical front-end and some of the socio-political workings and repercussions. Although screenshots are often considered documentary and evidentiary, they are also ‘operational images’ (Faroki 2004, Parikka 2023) that capture the ‘gaze of the search engine’ (Noble 2018:71,116). Combining praxis and theory as an intervention in design justice, 'critical feminist screenshotting' engenders what Haraway describes as a ‘partial perspective’, arguing for ‘politics and epistemologies of location, positioning and situating’ (1988). This practice of ‘feminist objectivity’ contributes to STS methods by privileging ‘contestation of webbed connections’ against a dominant Western, white and male ‘god view’ [Google] of infinite vision.
Ramón Iker Soria Royuela (Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT)) Ana Muñoz van den Eynde (CIEMAT) Unai Coto Suárez (CIEMAT)
Short abstract:
Surveys on social perception of science are a tool with several limitations. To address them, we present an innovative approach to analyse the social perception of science with a questionnaire developed according to Item Response Theory Models, based on the representational model of measurement.
Long abstract:
Public Understanding of Science studies are a branch of Science and Technology Studies that methodologically rely on surveys measuring the social perception of science. Several issues limit the information provided by these surveys. In particular, these surveys have been developed without regard to measurement theory and this makes it difficult to know what information the data actually provide. Furthermore, surveys in general have become such a ubiquitous tool for research, marketing and even business management that social reluctance to answer them is now widespread. In addition to the response bias generated by this reluctance, there is a generalized aversion to answering long questionnaires. We approached these difficulties from an innovative perspective with the aim of designing a questionnaire to analyse the social perception of science based on Item Response Theory (IRT) models. IRT models are supported by the representational model of measurement. This model defines measurement as the process of assigning numbers to objects based on rules, so that they reflect empirical relationships between objects. From this perspective, a questionnaire is a procedure for the objective and standardized measurement of a sample of behaviours to identify a latent trait and measuring would be an action comparable to finding the positions of people and items in a line. The mathematical expression of the IRT models ensures that people's response patterns are consistent with the ordering of the item locations along the variable and, therefore, measurement is independent of the items and the sample the data are obtained from.