A sociological approach to digital traces
Slide presented at "What People Leave Behind: Marks, Traces, Footprints and their Significance for Social Sciences", Online, June 15-16, 2021 While in sociology there is a little debate in the use of traces, in the Social Sciences and humanities there are several traditions in the interpretation of trace, and we focus our attention on the most interesting: the ethnomethodology, the school of suspicion, the interpretive anthropology, the evidential paradigm. What these traditions have in common is their interest in abductive reasoning or the way to use partial information to build probabilistic knowledge, a typical strategy of hunters, detectives, and physicians, archetypes of the social theory of traces. Then we propose a model for the interpretation of digital traces that is inspired by the cultural diamond of Wendy Griswold and for this reason we call it the digital traces’ diamond. Then we use a series of case study to describe how the proposed model works and how can be useful for the use of digital traces as a source of data.
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A sociological approach to digital traces
- 1. GOING HUNT THE TRACKS TO INVESTIGATE SOCIALITY. A SOCIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO DIGITAL TRACES Davide Bennato Università di Catania davide.bennato@unict.it @tecnoetica
- 2. PAPER Bennato, D. (2021), The Digital Traces’ Diamond. A Proposal to Put Together a Quantitative Approach, Interpretive Methods, and Computational Tools, Italian Sociological Review, vol. 11, n.4S, pp. 207-224. http://www.italiansociologicalreview.com/ojs/index.php?journal=ISR& page=article&op=view&path%5B%5D=432
- 3. WHAT ARE DIGITAL TRACES? • Signs testifying a process (social or digital) • Digital footprint, data traces, tracking elements…. https://connection.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publication-pdfs/data%20driven%20society%20sci%20amer_0.pdf
- 4. Different tradition for understanding traces The ethnomethodology approach: Garfinkel (1967), ethnomethods The school of suspicion: Ricoeur (1970), Nietsche, Marx, Freud The interpretive anthropology: Geertz (1973), thick description The evidential paradigm: Ginzburg (1979), the spy and art history http://crackleo.over-blog.com/2019/02/thick-description-clifford-geertz-pdf.html
- 5. Elements of digital traces Digital object: sign of a process (social or computational) Producer: a user related to the digital object Reference: computational context where the sign have a semantic Social process: social context the sign can be socially interpretable (Zappavigna, 2017) https://www.degruyter.com/view/book/9783110431070/10.1515/9783110431070-008.xml
- 7. A (simple) model for the digital traces Griswold (1994): the cultural diamond The digital traces’s diamond Cultural object Social world Creator Receiver Digital object Social process Producer Reference
- 8. Case study #1: Celebrate pride June 2015: Supreme Court decision to uphold marriage equality On social media many people celebrated the decision with rainbow profile photo Facebook’s researchers could retrieve user data to test predictive theories https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/06/were-all-those-rainbow-profile-photos-another-facebook-experiment/397088/
- 9. Digital object Social process Producer Reference Profile pic Slacktivism FB User FB Feed
- 10. Case study #2: The Koby Soto’s heartbreak January 2016: Koby Soto, a student from Israel, was left from his boyfriend by phone In that moment he was wearing a Fitbit who was recording his heartbeat throughout the day The Fitbit recorded the exact moment of their break up https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/a-mans-fitbit-captured-the-exact-moment-he-felt-heartbreak https://twitter.com/iamkoby/status/689521611611971588/photo/1
- 11. Digital object Social process Producer Reference Heartbeat Emotion Sensor Fitbit
- 12. Celebrity effect in Wikipedia The pageviews of Wikipedia reveal a celebrity effect The spikes of the data referrers to the death of different kind of famous people (journalists, musicians, politician, actors) https://pageviews.toolforge.org/pageviews/?project=it.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&redirects=0&range=latest-60&pages=Gianfranco_De_Laurentiis|Jole_Santelli|Alfredo_Cerruti|Pino_Scaccia|Gigi_Proietti|Stefano_D%27Orazio
- 14. Digital object Social process Producer Reference Page views Celebrity death Wikipedia reader Wikipedia
- 15. CONCLUSIONS Digital traces are an important part of the digital sociology and the digital methods We need to overcome any kind of dichotomy in the interpretation of data and digital processes The future of the digital sociologist (and in a a broad sense of the digital social scientist) rely on a mix of quantification (data), interpretation (theories or models), and computation (digital tools)