It can be pretty difficult, sometimes, to justify your commitment to ‘ethnographic’ methods. Partly, perhaps, because most people don’t quite know what being ethnographic means. But also because ‘being ethnographic’ is often devalued by the very people with whom British social scientists are increasingly encouraged to engage as part of the ‘Impact’ agenda. I do not think I am alone among doctoral students in having struggled to explain to the ‘technical’ and policy experts I encountered during my research quite...
(An alternative to mixed methods especially within the sociology of digital technology) Mixed methods in practice usually involves using quantitative and qualitative methods to allow researchers to cross-reference corroborating sources of data as they add layers of credibility to their studies (Creswell 2003). Mason’s facet methodology (Mason 2011) is an alternative to this “methods-driven integration or triangulation” of data that can characterise mixed methods “where methods and their products are fitted together in a predetermined or hierarchical way” (p84). The...
This year the World Wide Web is 25 years old. Web 1.0 was made possible by Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s creation of the http protocol which enabled us to retrieve of a copy of a document by accessing its address on a network. Web 2.0 was made by us; the content providers. To realise the semantic web or Web 3.0 technologists envision everything (documents, data, inanimate objects, even us) having an address on a network and artificial intelligence having the ability...
For its emerging practitioners, Digital Sociology is an ambitious and exciting new development. The ‘digital’ in its name is intentionally vague. It signifies anything that involves the transmission of 0s and 1s so includes everything from the Web, to the Internet of Things, to downloadable music, to devices that capture our heart rate: they are all within Digital Sociology’s scope. Digital Sociology is attempting to exploit all the opportunities digital technology can offer. Simultaneously, Digital Sociology plans to continue sociology’s...
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