Reassembling Social Science Methods: The Challenge of Digital Devices

Theory, Culture & Society

Volumn 30, Issue 4, 2013, Pages 22-46

  Ruppert, Evelyn ^a   Law, John ^b   Savage, Mike ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^b OPEN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

^c LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

actor network theory; big data; digital devices; genealogy; methodology; performativity; transactional data

Indexed keywords

EID: 84879536475     PISSN: 02632764     EISSN: 14603616     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0263276413484941     Document Type: Article

References (76)

1. Agamben G. (2005) State of Exception, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2. Amoore L. (2009) Lines of sight: on the visualization of unknown futures. Citizenship Studies 13(1): 17–30.
3. Barry A. (2005) Pharmaceutical matters: the invention of informed materials. Theory, Culture & Society 22(1): 51–69.
4. Bauman Z. (1987) Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-modernity and Intellectuals, London: Polity.
5. Beck U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage.
6. Beer D. (2009) Power through the algorithm? Participatory web cultures and the technological unconscious. New Media & Society 11(6): 985–1002.
7. Bell D. (1976) The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, New York: Basic Books.
8. Börner K. (2010) Atlas of Science: Visualizing What We Know, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
9. Boyd D., Crawford K. (2012) Critical questions for big data. Information, Communication & Society 15(5): 662–679.
10. Braverman H. (1974) Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, New York: Monthly Review Press.
11. Callon, M. (1986) Elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. In: Law J (ed.) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? London: Routledge.
12. Callon M. (1998) The Laws of the Market, Oxford: Blackwell.
13. Callon M. (2007) An essay on the growing contribution of economic markets to the proliferation of the social. Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8): 139–163.
14. Candea, M. (ed.) (2010) The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments. London: Routledge.
15. Castells M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age – Economy, Society and Culture Vol. 1 Oxford: Blackwell.
16. Castells M. (1997) The Power of Identity: The Information Age – Economy, Society and Culture Vol. 2 Oxford: Blackwell.
17. Christakis, N.A. (2012) A new kind of social science for the 21st century. Edge 8 August.
18. Deleuze G. (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, London: Athlone Press.
19. Dirks N. (2001) Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
20. Featherstone M. (2009) Ubiquitous media: an introduction. Theory, Culture & Society 26(3): 1–22.
21. Foucault M. (1976) Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin.
22. Foucault, M. (1980) The confession of the flesh (1977 interview). In: Gordon C (ed.) Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings. New York: Pantheon.
23. Fraser, M., Kember, S. and Lury, C. (eds) (2006) Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism. London: Sage.
24. Gane N. (2004) The Future of Social Theory, London: Continuum.
25. Giddens A. (1991) The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
26. Harvey D. (1989) The Condition of Post-modernity, Oxford: Blackwell.
27. Hine C. (2000) Virtual Ethnography, London: Sage.
28. Hine, C. (ed.) (2005) Virtual Methods: Issues in Social Research on the Internet. Oxford: Berg.
29. Hine, C. (ed.) (2006) New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production: Understanding E-Science. London: Idea Group Inc.
30. Huhtamo E., Parikka J. (2011) Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, Berkeley: University of California Press.
31. Kittler F.A. (1990) Discourse Networks 1800/1900, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
32. Kittler F.A. (2006) Number and numeral. Theory, Culture & Society 23(7–8): 51–61.
33. Knox H., O’Doherty D., Vurdubakis T., Westrup C. (2007) Transformative capacity, information technology, and the making of business “experts”. Sociological Review 55(1): 22–41.
34. Küchler S. (2008) Technological materiality: beyond the dualist paradigm. Theory, Culture & Society 25(1): 101–120.
35. Lash S. (2002) Critique of Information, London: Sage.
36. Latour B. (1988) Irréductions [published with The Pasteurisation of France], Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
37. Latour, B. (1990) Drawing things together. In: Lynch M and Woolgar S (eds) Representation in Scientific Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
38. Latour, B. (1998) Thought experiments in social science: from the social contract to virtual society. 1st Virtual Society? Annual Public Lecture, Brunel University.
39. Latour, B. (2010) Tarde's idea of quantification. In: Candea M (ed.) The Social after Gabriel Tarde: Debates and Assessments. London: Routledge.
40. Latour B., Woolgar S. (1986) Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
41. Law J. (2002) Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
42. Lazer D., Pentland A., Adamic L., Aral S., Barabasi A.L., Brewer D.et al. (2009) Computational social science. Science 323(5915): 721–723.
43. Lyotard J.-F. (1979) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
44. Mackenzie A. (2005) The performativity of the code: software and cultures of circulation. Theory, Culture & Society 22(1): 71–92.
45. Mackenzie A., Vurdubakis T. (2011) Codes and codings in crisis: signification, performativity and excess. Theory, Culture & Society 28(6): 3–23.
46. MacKenzie D. (2008) An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial Models Shape Markets, London: MIT Press.
47. Manovich, L. (2009) ‘Cultural analytics: visualising cultural patterns in the era of “more media’”, Domus (spring).
48. Manovich, L. (2011) Trending: the promises and the challenges of big social data. Available at: http://www.manovich.net/DOCS/Manovich_trending_paper.pdf (accessed April 2013).
49. Marres, N. and Rogers, R. (2005) Recipe for tracing the fate of issues and their publics on the web. In: Latour B (ed.) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
50. McNally R.M. (2005) Sociomics! Using the IssueCrawler to map, monitor and engage with the global proteomics research network. Proteomics 5(12): 3010–3016.
51. Mitchell T. (2002) Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity, Berkeley: University of California Press.
52. Osborne T., Rose N. (1999) Do the social sciences create phenomena? The example of public opinion research. British Journal of Sociology 50(3): 367–396.
53. Poster, M. (2001) The Information Subject. London: Routledge.
54. Rogers R. (2009a) The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
55. Rogers, R. (2009b) Post-demographic machines. In: Dekker A and Wolfsberger A (eds) Walled Garden. Amsterdam: Virtueel Platform.
56. Rose N. (1991) Governing by numbers: figuring out democracy. Accounting, Organizations and Society 16(7): 673–692.
57. Rose N. (2006) The Politics of Life Itself, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
58. Ruppert, E. (2007) Producing Population. CRESC Working Paper Series, No. 37. Available at: http://oro.open.ac.uk/9217/ (accessed April 2013).
59. Ruppert E. (2009) Becoming peoples: “counting heads in northern wilds’’. Journal of Cultural Economy 2(1–2): 11–31.
60. Ruppert E. (2010) Making populations: from censuses to metrics. Special issue of Leviathan (Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft) 35: 157–173.
61. Ruppert E. (2011) Population objects: interpassive subjects. Sociology 45(2): 218–233.
62. Ruppert, E. and Savage, M. (2012) Transactional politics. In: Adkins L and Lury C (eds) Measure and Value. Sociological Review Monograph Series. London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 73–92.
63. Savage M. (2010) Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
64. Savage M., Burrows R. (2007) The coming crisis of empirical sociology. Sociology 45(5): 885–889.
65. Schroeder R., Meyer E. (2012) Big data: what's new? Paper presented at ‘Internet, Politics, Policy 2012: Big Data, Big Challenges?’, Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute.
66. Simondon G. (1989) L’Individuation psychique et collective. A la lumière des notions de forme, information, potentiel et metastabilité, Paris: Editions Aubier.
67. Strathern, M. (2000) Abstraction and decontextualisation: an anthropological comment, Or: E for ethnography. Paper presented at the ‘Virtual Society? Get Real!’ conference, University of Cambridge.
68. Thacker E. (2005) The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics and Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
69. Thrift N. (2005) Knowing Capitalism, London: Sage.
70. Toffler A. (1980) The Third Wave, New York: Bantam Books.
71. Venn C., Boyne R., Phillips J., Bishop R. (2007) ‘Technics, media, teleology”: interview with Bernard Stiegler. Theory, Culture & Society 24(7–8): 334–341.
72. Venturini T. (2010) Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. Public Understanding of Science 21(7): 796–812.
73. Watts D.J. (2007) A twenty-first century science. Nature 445: 489–489.
74. Webster F. (1995) Theories of the Information Society, London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall.
75. Woolgar S. (2002) Virtual Society? Technology, Cyberbole, Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
76. Yoshimi S. (2006) Information. Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3): 271–288.