The Redistribution of Methods: On Intervention in Digital Social Research, Broadly Conceived

Abstract

This paper contributes to debates about the implications of digital technology for social research by proposing the concept of the redistribution of methods. In the context of digitization, I argue, social research becomes noticeably a distributed accomplishment: online platforms, users, devices and informational practices actively contribute to the performance of digital social research. This also applies more specifically to social research methods, and this paper explores the phenomenon in relation to two specific digital methods, online network and textual analysis, arguing that sociological research stands much to gain from engaging with it, both normatively and analytically speaking. I distinguish four predominant views on the redistribution of digital social methods: methods-as-usual, big methods, virtual methods and digital methods. Taking up this last notion, I propose that a redistributive understanding of social research opens up a new approach to the re-mediation of social methods in digital environments. I develop this argument through a discussion of two particular online research platforms: the Issue Crawler, a web-based platform for hyperlink analysis, and the Co-Word Machine, an online tool of textual analysis currently under development. Both these tools re-mediate existing social methods, and both, I argue, involve the attempt to render specific methodology critiques effective in the online realm, namely critiques of the authority effects implicit in citation analysis. As such, these methods offer ways for social research to intervene critically in digital social research, and more specifically, in redistributions of social methods currently ongoing in online environments.

Metodologías de análisis del espacio audiovisual online: Entre la innovación y la ansiedad de la novedad

“…Todo ello nos conduce a examinar los principios epistemológicos y metodológicos fundamentales de las ciencias sociales que, en muchos casos, son alterados desde espacios no académicos. Es lo que Marres denomina la "redistribución de los métodos" (Marres, 2012). de alguna manera, este trayecto parte de cómo las diversas investigaciones de lo audiovisual en Internet nos permiten problematizar qué es "lo audiovisual" para acabar problematizando "qué es investigar".…”

Experimentación etnográfica: infraestructuras de campo y re-aprendizajes de la antropología

“…Singularmente, la descripción de nuestras etnografías en términos experimentales señala un gesto recursivo que vuelve nuestros hallazgos sobre una práctica etnográfica que relatamos en términos vernáculos. Una descripción de ese tipo reconoce la proliferación de métodos más allá del contexto académico (Marres 2012) y la posibilidad de aprender de ellos (Estalella y Sánchez Criado 2015): lo experimental deja de ser úni-camente el objeto descrito por nuestras etnografías para convertirse en la sensibilidad tentativa que informa su método; en el caso descrito, a través de la adopción de una etnografía que toma una forma infraestructural.…”

Beyond the Bubble: Three empirical reasons for re-conceptualizing online visibility

“…Th e concept is inspired by recent work (Rogers, 2013;Marres, 2012;Mager, 2012) that clashes with the idea of thinking about the SERP as a privileged empirical site where the infl uence of the users ends and the technology begins to shape their attention. More specifi cally, the concept of web-visions builds on Richard Rogers' suggestion of looking at the SERP as an 'ordering device' (Rogers, 2013) that functions as a starting point from which the user can follow the medium and repurpose its logic to see the world in a specifi c way.…”

“…Th e concept is also supported by other recent writings on this topic. For instance, Noortje Marres (Marres, 2012) has forcefully argued that the chain of skills involved in the creation of online visibility-from data collection to analysis and visualization-is inevitably distributed across a range of socio-technical actors such as online platforms, web users, meta-data providers, algorithms and professional analysts. Th is call for a focus on the redistribution of information processing represents a quite diff erent theoretical move than a focus on the way the capacities for such processing are being displaced to a private company with a powerful algorithm.…”