Participative Epistemology in Social Data Science: Combining Ethnography with Computational and Statistical Approaches

Event details

Speaker: Dr Gian Marco Campagnolo, University of Edinburgh

In this pmeeting I introduce the new notion of participative epistemology and discuss how it can contribute to sensitising social data science. I will do so by offering the case of a project where ethnographic, computational and sequence analysis methods have been used in combination. By exemplifying it through the analysis of the project’s research design and early results, I suggest a new view on the collaboration between data science and social science. The new notion of participative epistemology will be articulated in three points: (1) a view of how research subjectivities can shape research design, (2) an attention for the research object as co-participant in the research and (3) a sensitivity for the object-relation regimes as having agency in shaping research outcomes.