Hacking Social Science for the Age of Datafication

The ongoing and intensifying datafication of our societies poses huge challenges as well as opportunities for social science to rethink core elements of its research enterprise. Prominently, there is a pressing need to move beyond the long-standing qualitative/quantitative divide. This paper is a...

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Main Author: Simon Lindgren
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: DIGSUM 2019-08-01
Series:Journal of Digital Social Research
Subjects:
Online Access:https://publicera.kb.se/jdsr/article/view/25255
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author Simon Lindgren
author_facet Simon Lindgren
author_sort Simon Lindgren
collection DOAJ
description The ongoing and intensifying datafication of our societies poses huge challenges as well as opportunities for social science to rethink core elements of its research enterprise. Prominently, there is a pressing need to move beyond the long-standing qualitative/quantitative divide. This paper is an argument towards developing a critical science of data, by bringing together the interpretive theoretical and ethical sensibilities of social science with the predictive and prognostic powers of data science and computational methods. I argue that the renegotiation of theories and research methods that must be made in order for them to be more relevant and useful, can be fruitfully understood through the metaphor of hacking social science: developing creative ways of exploiting existing tools in alternative and unexpected ways to solve problems
format Article
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spelling doaj-art-5ac01e3b833b4337888dfbf74fa1ece52025-08-20T02:18:39ZengDIGSUMJournal of Digital Social Research2003-19982019-08-011110.33621/jdsr.v1i1.6Hacking Social Science for the Age of DataficationSimon Lindgren0https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6289-9427Umeå University, Sweden The ongoing and intensifying datafication of our societies poses huge challenges as well as opportunities for social science to rethink core elements of its research enterprise. Prominently, there is a pressing need to move beyond the long-standing qualitative/quantitative divide. This paper is an argument towards developing a critical science of data, by bringing together the interpretive theoretical and ethical sensibilities of social science with the predictive and prognostic powers of data science and computational methods. I argue that the renegotiation of theories and research methods that must be made in order for them to be more relevant and useful, can be fruitfully understood through the metaphor of hacking social science: developing creative ways of exploiting existing tools in alternative and unexpected ways to solve problems https://publicera.kb.se/jdsr/article/view/25255Digital Social ScienceDatafication
spellingShingle Simon Lindgren
Hacking Social Science for the Age of Datafication
Journal of Digital Social Research
Digital Social Science
Datafication
title Hacking Social Science for the Age of Datafication
title_full Hacking Social Science for the Age of Datafication
title_fullStr Hacking Social Science for the Age of Datafication
title_full_unstemmed Hacking Social Science for the Age of Datafication
title_short Hacking Social Science for the Age of Datafication
title_sort hacking social science for the age of datafication
topic Digital Social Science
Datafication
url https://publicera.kb.se/jdsr/article/view/25255
work_keys_str_mv AT simonlindgren hackingsocialsciencefortheageofdatafication