Towards a Digital Reflexive Sociology: Using Wikipedia's Biographical Repository as a Reflexive Tool

Abstract

This article proposes the development of 'digital reflexive sociology', that is, the use of digital methods and Big Data to systematically understand the social and historical conditions of sociologists. To show the potential of this approach, the group of 500 sociologists who have their biographies written in 10 or more languages within Wikipedia is studied. Computational methods were used to extract temporal, spatial and relational information from these biographies in order to construct a general historical account of the discipline. The analysis shows various structural patterns of 'collectively remembered' sociology: historical changes in the frequency of globally recognized sociologists, trends in gender composition, degrees of diffusion and centrality of the main referents, geographical concentrations of the discipline, disciplinary differentiation in networks of greater biographical connectivity, flows of biographical references between countries, and birth-death migration patterns. Considering the temporal evolution of these aspects, we distinguish five generations of sociologists who shared similar collective circumstances. The record of high concentration (in terms of geography, gender and schools of thought) evidenced by the passing of these generations is highlighted. The results are discussed together with a more general reflection on the opportunities and limits of an eventual digital reflexive sociology.

Visibility layers: a framework for systematising the gender gap in Wikipedia content

“…To build this model, we will draw mainly on two sources: (1) a theory that understands knowledge organisations as regimes of visibility, and that goes back to Michel Foucault's studies in the 1960s and 1970s (Foucault, 2013(Foucault, , 2012, although it was later systematised by Gilles Deleuze (1988) and used by Nathaniel Tkacz (2007) to analyse the reorganisation of power in Wikipedia;and (2) the official information on how this platform works, which can be found on several websites of the encyclopaedia (e.g., Wikipedia, 2020f, 2020cWikipedia, 2020f, , 2020a and has been systematised in some publications (Lih, 2009;Jemielniak, 2014;Beytía & Müller, 2019).…”

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Visibility Layers: A Framework for Facing the Complexity of the Gender Gap in Wikipedia Content

“…To build this model, we will draw mainly on two sources: 1) a theory that understands knowledge organisations as regimes of visibility, and that goes back to Michel Foucault's studies in the 1960s and 1970s (Foucault, 2013(Foucault, , 2012, although it was later systematised by Gilles Deleuze (1988) and used by Nathaniel Tkacz (2007) to analyse the reorganisation of power in Wikipedia; and 2) the official information on how this platform works, which can be found on several websites of the encyclopaedia (e.g., Wikipedia, 2020f, 2020cWikipedia, 2020f, , 2020a and has been systematised in some publications (Lih, 2009;Jemielniak, 2014;Beytía & Müller, 2019).…”