March 18, 2016 University of Edinburgh

1. Conceptualizing Digital Sociology as
Critical, Interdisciplinary Practice
Dr. Karen Gregory
Digital Day of Ideas | May 18th 2016
University of Edinburgh
@claudiakincaid
#DigScholEd

2. Source: http://akraya.com/managed-projects/big-data/

3. • Why Digital Sociology?
• Examples of current work:
• Enchanted Entrepreneurs: Karen Gregory
• The Quantified Self: Deborah Lupton
• Facebook as Value: Beverley Skeggs & Simon Yuill
• Connecting our work: How do we participate in
building this emerging digital, social world?

4. “…privacy, the private self, human and civil rights,
governance and citizenship, finance, health and
medicine… and even, of course, education…”

5. Tracing Digital Sociology

6. “…long history of research done in Internet
studies, information and communication studies,
media and cultural studies, the sociology of
science and technology, and surveillance
studies…”

8. “The very algorithms that makes Facebook
what it is, for example, do not simply arrive
in our lives.
They themselves are the result of human
labor, decision-making processes, flows of
capital, and even the extraction of rare
minerals necessary for their very computing
power.”

9. “Like Mills, we remain interested in understanding
the rather complicated nature of human agency in
an increasingly technocratic society.”

10. how digitization affects or alters “the relations
between researchers and researched, and those
between the objects, methods, [and] techniques
of social research, broadly conceived.” – Noortje
Marres
“What is Digital Sociology?” 2013 http://www.csisponline.net/2013/01/21/what-is-
digital-sociology/

11. … such methods do not just describe society but
“help to create it anew.” – Evelyn Ruppert
Digital SociologyPodcast, 2013: https://markcarrigan.net/2013/09/10/evelyn-ruppert-
on-digital-sociology/

12. • Gregory, Karen. (2014) Enchanted Entrepreneurs: The
Labor of Esoteric Practitioners in New York City.
Dissertation. City University of New York.
• Lupton, Deborah. (2016) The Quantified Self. Polity Press:
Boston, MA.
• Skeggs, Beverley & Yuill, Simon (2015) “The methodology
of a multi-model project examining how Facebook
infrastructures social relations.” Information,
Communication, and Society. DOI:
10.1080/1369118X.2015.1091026

13. Values and Value
https://values.doc.gold.ac.uk/

14. “… Increasingly, we are now seeing digital
technologies and data-aggregating apparatuses
developing in the service of a positivism that
desires not only to represent social life, but to
predict its very outcomes…”