The digital, in the form of technologies, scenarios, objects, processes, and relational and interactional structures, is increasingly becoming central to understanding culture, society, human experience, and the social world. It permeates our society’s practices, symbols, and shared meanings, and it makes old distinctions, such as the one between online and offline, real and virtual, and material and immaterial, obsolete. It also introduces digitally native objects of research, such as cyber-bullying and digital identities, which have a direct impact on mainstream sociological problems.
The penetration of the internet into our daily lives has dramatically increased the volume and variety of both intentionally and unintentionally produced digital data (e.g., social media posts, narratives, storytelling, search engine queries, phone calls, and banking interactions). This provides new methodological resources for researching social phenomena, and it forces us to rethink traditional social research methods.
At the same time, digitalization also raises a number of theoretical and methodological issues. As concerns the former, it is likely to entail broad societal transformations. As an example, Marres (2017) considers how a victim’s publication of a suicide note online shifts the phenomenon of suicide from the intimate to the public sphere in our digital society. As concerns the latter, digitalization raises a host of issues related to the accessibility of data, due to, among other things, the APIcalypse and the proprietary closure of data; the non-neutrality/biased nature of algorithms; and the lack of socio-demographic information.
Relatedly, big data results in both direct and indirect forms of digital discrimination, where by “digital discrimination,” we mean the unequal, unfair, or unethical treatment of users on the basis of income, education, gender, age, ethnicity, and religion, caused by the adoption of algorithms and machine learning techniques. Digital discrimination may have negative effects on sampling, by drawing a disproportionate amount of attention to certain social groups at the expense of others. It may also have negative effects on the interpretation of results. Think, for example, of dating app algorithms, which encourage the selection of partners of the same race, thereby perpetuating sexual racism.
This Research Topic focuses on the challenges and opportunities of the digital, construed both as an object of research and as a methodological tool. It will bring together researchers from different disciplines (e.g., sociology, education, and political science) and research areas (e.g., gender and sexualities and media and communication), who engage in wide forms of reflection on digital sociology, digital society, and digital methods. By “digital methods,” here we mean both traditional methods such as content analysis, ethnography, and surveys, but as applied to the digital; and natively digital methods.
The editors invite contributions of interdisciplinary nature focusing on (but not limited to) one or more of the following themes:
- theoretical, epistemological, methodological, ontological, and ethical reflections on digital research
- the implications of digital research on cross-disciplinary ethnographic studies
- the rediscovery of content analysis in digital contexts
- digital social network analysis: methods for the analysis of social network data and types of research questions
- the role of technological affordances, infrastructures, algorithms, and devices in digital research
- digital inequalities and discriminations resulting from technological infrastructures
- computational social sciences and critical theory.
Theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome, so long as they critically discuss perspectives on, and new challenges for, digital social research. Submissions may also consider the relationship between social research and the COVID-19 pandemic, in light of the latter’s consequences on the adoption of digital solutions, the importance of digital innovations, the role of the internet in daily life, and the hybridization of social and technological processes.
The digital, in the form of technologies, scenarios, objects, processes, and relational and interactional structures, is increasingly becoming central to understanding culture, society, human experience, and the social world. It permeates our society’s practices, symbols, and shared meanings, and it makes old distinctions, such as the one between online and offline, real and virtual, and material and immaterial, obsolete. It also introduces digitally native objects of research, such as cyber-bullying and digital identities, which have a direct impact on mainstream sociological problems.
The penetration of the internet into our daily lives has dramatically increased the volume and variety of both intentionally and unintentionally produced digital data (e.g., social media posts, narratives, storytelling, search engine queries, phone calls, and banking interactions). This provides new methodological resources for researching social phenomena, and it forces us to rethink traditional social research methods.
At the same time, digitalization also raises a number of theoretical and methodological issues. As concerns the former, it is likely to entail broad societal transformations. As an example, Marres (2017) considers how a victim’s publication of a suicide note online shifts the phenomenon of suicide from the intimate to the public sphere in our digital society. As concerns the latter, digitalization raises a host of issues related to the accessibility of data, due to, among other things, the APIcalypse and the proprietary closure of data; the non-neutrality/biased nature of algorithms; and the lack of socio-demographic information.
Relatedly, big data results in both direct and indirect forms of digital discrimination, where by “digital discrimination,” we mean the unequal, unfair, or unethical treatment of users on the basis of income, education, gender, age, ethnicity, and religion, caused by the adoption of algorithms and machine learning techniques. Digital discrimination may have negative effects on sampling, by drawing a disproportionate amount of attention to certain social groups at the expense of others. It may also have negative effects on the interpretation of results. Think, for example, of dating app algorithms, which encourage the selection of partners of the same race, thereby perpetuating sexual racism.
This Research Topic focuses on the challenges and opportunities of the digital, construed both as an object of research and as a methodological tool. It will bring together researchers from different disciplines (e.g., sociology, education, and political science) and research areas (e.g., gender and sexualities and media and communication), who engage in wide forms of reflection on digital sociology, digital society, and digital methods. By “digital methods,” here we mean both traditional methods such as content analysis, ethnography, and surveys, but as applied to the digital; and natively digital methods.
The editors invite contributions of interdisciplinary nature focusing on (but not limited to) one or more of the following themes:
- theoretical, epistemological, methodological, ontological, and ethical reflections on digital research
- the implications of digital research on cross-disciplinary ethnographic studies
- the rediscovery of content analysis in digital contexts
- digital social network analysis: methods for the analysis of social network data and types of research questions
- the role of technological affordances, infrastructures, algorithms, and devices in digital research
- digital inequalities and discriminations resulting from technological infrastructures
- computational social sciences and critical theory.
Theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome, so long as they critically discuss perspectives on, and new challenges for, digital social research. Submissions may also consider the relationship between social research and the COVID-19 pandemic, in light of the latter’s consequences on the adoption of digital solutions, the importance of digital innovations, the role of the internet in daily life, and the hybridization of social and technological processes.