Algorithmic Intelligence? Reconstructing Citizenship through Digital Methods
In the next post for ‘The Person in the (Big) Data‘ edition, Chris Birchall @birchallchris talks us through a variety of methods – big, small and mixed – that he used to study citizenship in the UK. Using some of the dominant tools for studying large data sources in one part of the study, Chris realised that the tools used had a significant impact on what can be (and is being) discovered and that this is quite different from the findings reached by deeper, mixed methods analysis. In this post, Chris asks important questions about whether big data research tools are creating some the conditions of citizenship today and what, exactly, deeper, more nuanced analysis can tell us.
People talk about politics online in many different ways and for many different purposes. The way that researchers analyse and understand such conversation can influence the way that we depict public political opinion and citizenship. In two recent projects I investigated the nature of this conversation and the forces that influence it, as well as the networks, spaces and resources that link that talk to political action. In doing so, I encountered a methodological rift in which careful, manual, time consuming approaches produce different types of conclusions from the big data driven approaches that are widespread in the commercial social media analytics industry. Both of these approaches could be framed as an illustration of human behaviour on the internet, but their differences show that the way that we embrace big data or digital methods influences the understanding of digital publics and citizenship that we gain from the translation of mass online data.
My recently submitted PhD study investigated online public political conversation in the UK. Drawing on the work of previous scholars who have focussed on the deliberative online public sphere (such as Coleman and Gotze, 2001; Coleman and Moss, 2012; Mutz, 2006; Wright and Street, 2007; Graham, 2012), the study acknowledged the importance of interpersonal exchange between participants and exposure to diverse and opposing viewpoints in the formation of preferences and informed opinion. My initial motivation was to ask how interface design might influence people as they talk about politics in online spaces, but this required an examination of the more human, less technologically determinate factors that are also, and often more significantly, involved in political expression.
Over the course of the study it became obvious that the methodology used to investigate these concepts influences the insight obtained; something that many researchers have discussed in the context of digital methods within social science (Baym, 2013; Boyd and Crawford, 2012; Clough et al., 2015; Gitelman and Jackson, 2013; Kitchin and Lauriault, 2014; Kitchin, 2014; Manovich, 2011; Van Dijck, 2014). Technologically mediated questions can be answered through technology-centric methods to give technologically focussed answers, while questions involving human nature, motivation and interaction can be answered by qualitative, human-centred methods in order to provide human-centred answers. These approaches represent the divide between the large scale, quantitative analysis of big data methods and small scale qualitative approaches. In order to address this issue, I employed a methodology which was designed to combine these approaches through directed iterations of analysis that was initially large scale and quantitative, but increasingly small scale and qualitative.Read More… Algorithmic Intelligence? Reconstructing Citizenship through Digital Methods
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