10am – 4pm, Saturday 24 February 2018 Palmer 101, Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading ‘Social Listening’ Workshop Following the interdisciplinary showcase conference ‘’Social Listening’ in the past, present and future’ in November 2017, we are pleased to announce a British… Read More ›
Digital Sociology 
Understanding the political economy of digital technology
A BSA Digital Sociology Study Group event hosted by the Web Science conference at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam May 27th 2018 In more optimistic times we thought of ourselves as masters of digital technology: we told ourselves it was empowering, liberating,… Read More ›
Answering social science questions with social media data, March 8th in London
After last year’s successful ‘Introduction to tools for social media research’, the SRA and #NSMNSS network are teaming up again on 8 March to deliver a one-day conference in London on ‘Answering social science questions with social media data’. What… Read More ›
CfP: Marketization and the digital economy
Submissions are now open for SASE’s 30th annual conference, Global Reordering: Prospects for Equality, Democracy and Justice, hosted by Doshisha University from 23-25 June 2018. This is for a special section on digitalisation: Global reordering in the economy is occurring… Read More ›
Answering social science questions with social media data
What role can social media research play in the social sciences? What are the questions it can help us to answer? Speakers from a range of backgrounds will talk about their experiences of using social media in their research, providing… Read More ›
CfP: Sharing and Storing: Everyday relationships with digital material
CALL FOR PROPOSALS Sharing and Storing: Everyday relationships with digital material Special Issue of New Media & Society Edited by Heather A. Horst The University of Sydney, Australia Jolynna Sinanan RMIT University, Australia Larissa Hjorth RMIT University, Australia Abstract Submission… Read More ›
Call for speakers: Answering social science questions with social media data
Thursday 8th March 2018, The Wellcome Collection, London, NW1 2BE After several successful events, we’re pleased to say that the NSMNSS network (http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/) and Social Research Association (www.the-sra.org.uk) are again teaming up to deliver a one-day conference on ‘Answering social science… Read More ›
Computational social science and the promise of a reflexive, empirically robust activist-sociology
By John-Paul Smiley What is the role for sociology going forward? What should it look like as a discipline? Discussions of this topic have become commonplace (see, for example, Flyvberg: 2001: Rutzou: 2016). The failure of the majority of researchers in… Read More ›
CFP: The Will to App: Digitising Public Health
Call For Papers Media International Australia no. 171 (May 2019) The Will to App: Digitising Public Health Theme Editors: Kath Albury, Paul Byron and Frances Shaw Overview This themed issue of MIA proposes to engage with the digitisation and mediatisation… Read More ›
The content density of a cultural producer
An interesting snippet on pg 164 of Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Thingssuggests a metric of content density which could be extremely interesting to explore: Digiday looked at the race for what some are calling peak content. What it found… Read More ›
The rhetoric and reality of user generated content
On pg 102 of Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things, he highlights email exchanges between YouTube’s founders, released in a court case, which suggest the invocation of ‘user generated content’ might be a matter of branding rather than a meaningful… Read More ›
The Digital Sociology podcast series
An interesting new project by occasional SI contributor Chris Till, following from his Digital Health series:
“So you thought about it one day and started the next morning?”
This is a question which Zeynep Tufekci recalls in her Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, posed to a group of young Turkish activists about 140journos, a crowdsourced citizen journalism project which they started. As she writes… Read More ›
Denaturalising digital capitalism
One of the most pressing issues we confront when analysing the digital economy is a pronounced tendency towards oligopoly which makes a lie of an earlier generation’s utopian embrace of the Internet as a sphere of free competition and a… Read More ›
CfP: “Truth, facts, and fake: The shifting epistemologies of news in a digital age”
Special issue of New Media & Society and related online workshop Truth, facts, and fake: The shifting epistemologies of news in a digital age Co-editors: Mats Ekström, University of Gothenburg Seth C. Lewis, University of Oregon Oscar Westlund, University of… Read More ›
The data warriors and the electoral wars they wage
One of the most interesting issues raised by the rise of data science in party politics is how to untangle corporate rhetoric from social reality. I have much time for the argument that we risk taking the claims of a… Read More ›
Emotion and affect in datafied worlds – workshop in Helsinki, 1st of Nov
1st of November 2017, University of Helsinki, Finland Feeling data: emotion and affect in datafied worlds – workshop Scholars working in the interdisciplinary field of ‘critical data studies’ have begun to address the effects of ‘datafication’ – understood as the… Read More ›
Outflanking Platitudes: We should be excited but cautious about Platform Cooperativism
In the first episode of Outflanking Platitudes, Mark Carrigan argues we should be excited but cautious about the promise of Platform Cooperativism. This 2 minute 8 second provocation was recorded at the Centre for Social Ontology Book Launch event on… Read More ›
CFP: Global Digital Media Cultures and “Extreme Speech”
CFP WORKSHOP Global Digital Media Cultures and “Extreme Speech” 23-24 February 2018 Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich Abstracts due: 31 August 2017 Convenors: Sahana Udupa (LMU Munich) Matti Pohjonen (Africa’s Voices Foundation) Recent political upheavals in Europe and the US have… Read More ›
The dark future of mediatization
In the last year, Facebook Live has been plagued by occasional headlines reporting on shocking instances of violence being streamed through the platform. The sporadic quality of these reports easily creates an impression that this is exception. There have always… Read More ›
Digital media and ontological security
There’s an intriguing argument in The Mediated Construction of Social Reality, by Nick Couldry and Andreas Hepp, concerning our dependence upon digital media and how we respond to its failure. From loc 5527: We feel the costs viscerally: when ‘our’… Read More ›
CfP: Japan in the Digital Age
Japan in the Digital Age Call for Papers for a one-day Symposium Saturday 28th October, 2017 The Shed, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester Keynote Speakers Prof. Ian Condry, Professor of Japanese Cultural Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Mr. Kazuhito Gen-I (??… Read More ›
CfP: Online Othering: Exploring the Dark Side of the Web
Call for Papers – Edited Collection Online Othering: Exploring the Dark Side of the Web Editors: Dr Karen Lumsden (Loughborough University) and Dr Emily Harmer (University of Liverpool) The Internet plays a vital role in many aspects of our social,… Read More ›
A conversation with Dave Elder-Vass about the Digital Economy
In this podcast I talk to Dave Elder-Vass about his new book, Profit and Gift in the Digital Economy. Find out more about his research here.
Will social media lead to the return of the general intellectual?
In his detailed study of Sartre’s rise to prominence as an authoritative public intellectual, Patrick Baert argues that the general intellectualism embodied by Sartre depended upon social conditions which no longer obtain. Such intellectuals “address a wide range of subjects… Read More ›
What is a research technologist?
I described myself as an ‘academic technologist’ for a number of years. During my part-time PhD, I’d drifted into a number of roles which felt connected but which were difficult to summarise: training people to use NVIVO, writing digital scholarship resources, advising… Read More ›
How can the social sciences keep up with socio-technical change?
At a recent symposium I saw Ben Williamson give an excellent lecture about the rapidly developing field of educational data science and how it is reshaping educational practice. Some of the material is summarised here for those interested. It was a really… Read More ›
CFA Postgraduate Conference – Digital Communities: interdisciplinary perspective
Post-Graduate Conference Digital Communities: interdisciplinary perspective Monday 3rd July 2017, Cardiff We look forward to welcoming you to our first Postgraduate Interdisciplinary Conference! “Digital Communities: interdisciplinary perspectives” postgraduate conference will be organised by PhD students from the schools of Social… Read More ›
Digital Scholarship and Why It Matters
In a world where so many aspects of our lives are becoming increasingly digital, it is not surprising that academia has also been influenced. University of Canberra Centenary Research Professors Patrick Dunleavy and Deborah Lupton join Swinburne University of Technology’s… Read More ›