Performing digital ways of knowing: epistemic walks with
methods-‐as-‐prototypes ESS 2016
March 17th 2016 Boston Park Plaza Hotel
Chiara Carrozza, research fellow Centro de Estudos Sociais -‐ CES
hDp://www.ces.uc.pt/invesHgadores/index.php?acHon=bio&id_invesHgador=592
Background
• The project “The importance of being digital. Exploring digital scholarship and digital methods”
hDp://bedigital.hypotheses.org/
• Research lines – Digital scholarship – Digital methods
– Digital cultures • Research strategy of the project: training events to gather empirical data
PragmaHc “these innovaHons will enable research to be conducted more quickly, beDer, and in more powerful ways” (DuDon 2010: 21)
PoliHcal “digital scholarship is more than just using informaHon and communicaHon technologies to research, teach and collaborate; it also includes embracing the open values, ideology and potenHal of technologies born of peer-‐to-‐peer networking and wiki ways of working in order to benefit both the academy and society” (Weller 2011: 50).
Epistemological “does the digital give us new ways to think or only ways to illustrate what we already know?” (Kirch 2014)
“Can we study social media to learn something about society rather than about social media use? Can hyperlinks reveal not just the value of a Web site but the poliHcs of associaHon?” (Rogers 2013)
Debate about the “crisis of empirical social sciences” (Savage and Burrows 2007; 2009) and the criHcal agenda of the ‘Social Life of Methods’ (Savage 2013)
ContribuHons about how digital data and devices are reconfiguring social science methods and its very assumpHons (Ruppert et al. 2013; Marres 2012)
InvitaHon to culHvate “live sociology” (Back 2007) and “live methods” (SI on the Sociological Review, 2012)
InvenHveness of methods (Lury and Wakeford 2012)
Workshop “FAQs about Open Access: the poliHcal economy of publishing in anthropology and beyond” -‐ Medialab-‐Prado, Madrid, 16-‐17 October 2014.
But I think that what really is a stake for social sciences is not the quesHon of access to text but how the social sciences are going to infrastructure themselves in this new ecology of media and digital signals and meaning making that is taking shape. And if we reduce the quesHon… to access, as access to text, and the assumpHons that the kind of knowledge that is implicit or inscribed in the epistemics of text I think in a way we are entrenched in an old social science with an old concepHon of what scholarship is about, what making scholarly knowing is about and who the publics of that scholarly knowledge are. In my point of view, I would try to displace slightly the old vision of what is… -‐ not so much what is open, because opening, you know, it’s a poliHcal ethics quesHon -‐ but to what access is” (Alberto Corsín Jiménez, session 1).
Prototyping cultures: art, science and poli:cs in beta. Special Issue, Journal of Cultural Economy 7 (4), 2014
hDp://www.prototyping.es/
Carrozza, Chiara & Gaspar, Andrea (2016), Performing digital ways of knowing: epistemic walks with methods-‐as-‐prototypes, Graduate Journal for Social Sciences (GJSS).
Gaspar, Andrea (2016), Taking ethnography & design collaboraHons for a walk: devicing idiocy, Tomás Sánchez Criado and Adolfo Estalella (eds.) “Experimental collaboraHons: ethnography through fieldwork devices”.