The digitalization raises a number of both theoretical and methodological issues.
From a theoretical point of view, the digital should not be intended as a separate or sectorial field of study but rather as an irreducible field of analysis entailing broader societal transformation and making possible new forms of understanding sociality that arise from the complex interactions between digital technology, social research and social life (Marres, 2017).
It permeates the micro, meso and macro areas shaking sociological theories and transforming the most basic assumptions underlying them.
From a micro perspective the digital has the potential of making porous the public-private boundary for example by transforming traditional intimate and private phenomena into a public-facing genre such as in the case of digital suicide and the practice of publishing the last notes on social media (Marres, 2017) or in the case of the relationship with social media profiles of dead people. Moreover, the digital has accelerated the inclusion within daily life of practices related to virtual worlds and video games, such as gamification extended to every aspect of real life, virtual reality applications in every field of human activities, or the creation of the multiverse.
The digital is also a socializing institution for legitimizing minority, non-normative and stigmatized sexualities which use digital spaces as performative spaces for reflexivity, self-understanding and acceptance and language negotiation (Delli Paoli, Masullo, 2022). Sometimes the digital offers also backspaces for deviant practices (deviant sexuality, criminality, illegal actions, etc.) validating and exacerbating deviant desires and practices (such as pedophilia, child pornography, cybercrime, cyber bullying, etc.) (Delli Paoli, 2022).
From the meso perspective, the digital is impacting the forms of social ties and the relationships between social sectors and practices, as the example of forms of distributed democracy and citizen sourcing, clearly demonstrates. More in general it is transforming the forms of social support and models of community and communitarism, changing both the sources of social capital (strengthening existing social relationships but also activating new and latent ties), its consequences (both positive such trust and relationships’ building and negative such as segregation, conflict, inequality and crime) and space-time anchorage (Caliandro, 2018).
From the macro perspective, the digital can produce new organizational forms, alternative to capitalist economy such as in the case of the sharing economy or new spaces of inclusion/exclusion by exacerbating inequalities, producing and reproducing social orders and stratifications, operating along axes of divisions and differentiating people’s space of opportunities, well-being and level of agency.
Apart from entailing broad societal transformations which need to find a place in sociological theory, the incorporation of technology into our daily materiality, is also transforming social research methods by providing methodological resources for researching social phenomena (both intentionally and unintentionally produced digital data such as social media posts, narratives, storytelling, search engine queries, phone calls, and banking interactions) (Amaturo, Aragona, 2019).
Digital has accelerated the hybridization and inclusion within social research methodology of practices and related disciplinary fields, such as video games. Video games are proving to be a fruitful analytical support for the analysis of social phenomena of various kinds, not only those closely related to the media sphere (Kennedy, 2006; Mayra, 2008; Neitzel, 2010). In this context, Game-Based Methods were born and are being developed. Initially adopted within educational research, in recent years video games have also been used in a variety of ways within social research: as a tool to conduct surveys (Keush & Zhang, 2017) or to detect (or "measure") complex concepts (Foroughi, Serraino, Parasuraman & Boehm - Davis, 2016), as an integral part of a research design (Denisova & Cairns, 2015) or as a general methodological perspective of research (Zendle, Cairns & Kudenko, 2015).
This opens methodological challenges at different levels of the research process. At the level of data collection where the non-neutrality of algorithms, the identity strategies of self-presentation applied online, the invisibility of the research design in repurposing digital data, need to be taken into account (Veltri 2019; Delli Paoli, Masullo, 2022). At the level of research design where new competences are required implying technological proficient researcher able to use a digital language based on the affordances of online environments (the socio-technical architectures of media) (Marres, Weltevrede, 2013).
At the level of sampling which is complicated on the web by direct digital discriminations (sampling biases deriving from procedures discriminating against minorities or disadvantaged groups based on race, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) and indirect digital discrimination (sampling biases deriving from procedures intentionally or accidentally discriminating against a minority) (Criado, Such, 2019; Favaretto, De Clercq, Elger, 2019). At the level of data analysis both in qualitative approach due to online narratives being intertextual, transmedial, multimodal and interdiscursive and in quantitative analysis for example in big data-based correlation which are not automatically meaningful and do not tell much about humanity (human motivations, feelings, values, norms, meanings, etc.) failing to understand deep motivations (Fuchs, 2017; 2019).
Digital social research seems to extend the importance of human interpretation beyond the boundaries of qualitative research (where it is incorrectly confined) imposing to interpret technology and avoid the mythology of data objectivity also as an antidote for digital discriminations.
In the previous editions of this conference, which is now at its fourth edition, we focused on the epistemological impact of digital methods, on innovative methodological practices (digital ethnography, computational analysis, etc.), on the impact of the digital on traditionally “offline” and face-to-face contexts
such as education, policy and politics, sensitive topics and population such as gender and sexualities.
This resulted in several publications which collect the outputs of the previous conferences:
Leveraging on the previous editions, this conference will explore the main challenges digitalization poses to different strand of sociological theories and methods particularly investigating the distinctive topics of digital social research and the digital biases.
Thus, it especially (but not exclusively) calls for contributions that shed new light on the following topics:
Abstracts need to be limited to 500 words and include goals, research methods and main findings. Please use the abstract form and send it as an attached file to: labilis@unisa.it
Abstract form, 87 kBThe scientific committee of the conference will select best papers for publications in special issues dedicated to the conference and/or national or international books.
| Conference Program, 1.3 MB |
The registration deadline for presenters is 28 April 2023. The fee for both on-site and online conference is €50.The conference fee includes two lunches and coffee breaks for on-site participants. Students and Ph.D.candidates are exempt from paying conference fee.
After acceptance further information about payment will be provided. Authors with insufficient funding will be eligible for partial fee support.
Please, apply for the fee support by writing to labilis@unisa.it and motivating your request.
The conference is organised by the International Lab for innovative social research (ILIS). The lab is an interdisciplinary centre for social research established within the Department of Humanities, Philosophy and Education. It aims to stimulate theoretical and methodological discussions, as well as empirical studies, on emerging trends in social research: from theoretical challenges faced by new social issues to innovative methodological approaches to understand them. The lab’s mission is to promote theoretical, epistemological and methodological advances in the social sciences through continuous exchanges with national and international scholars. The research interests focus on social processes ranging from educational, migratory, identity and cultural processes, to gender, generational and health issues drawing special attention to the social research methods. The main goal is to offer an integrated research system to direct scientific actions towards an innovative theoretical and empirical knowledge of the processes transforming our societies. From the scientific point of view, the centre aims to combine the understanding of contemporary social processes with emerging trends in social research methods which have innovated traditional approaches and have introduced alternative data collection and analysis methods together with new methods for representing information (such as in the case of e-methods and big data analysis).
The conference will be held on the 8th and 9th of June 2023.
Estonská 500, 101 00, Prague 10 – Czech Republic GPS: 50.0711122N, 14.4530614E
Deadline to submit abstracts: 12 March 2023
Author Notification: 25 March 2023
Payment Deadline: 28 April 2023
Deadline to submit papers: 27 May 2023
Conference dates: 8-9 June 2023
Giuseppe Maiello, University of Finance and Administration Prague
Felice Addeo, Angela Delli Paoli, Giuseppe Masullo, University of Salerno; Gabriella Punziano, University of Naples Federico II, Jitka Cirklová, ČVUT Prague; Eva Kostikov, Jan Lánský, Naděžda Petrů, University of Finance and Administration Prague.
Rudolf Blábolil, Noemi Crescentini, Marco Di Gregorio, Lucie Finová, Giuseppe Michele Padricelli, Assunta Scaglione.
Addeo F., Masullo G. (2021). Studying the digital society: digital methods between tradition and innovation in social research. Italian Sociological Review, 11 (4S), 153-165.
Amaturo E., Aragona B. (2019). Methods for big data in social sciences. Mathematical Population Studies, 26 (2), 65-68.
Caliandro, A. (2018). Digital Methods for Ethnography: analytical concepts for ethnographers exploring social media environments, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 47(5), 551-578.
Criado, N., Such, J.M. (2019). Digital Discrimination in “Algorithmic Regulation”. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Delli Paoli A. (2022). The Potential of Digital Ethnography for Sensitive Topics and Hidden Population. Italian Sociological Review, 12(7S), 729-247.
Delli Paoli A., Masullo G. (2022). Digital Social Research: Topics and Methods. Italian Sociological Review, 12(7S), 617-633.
Favaretto, M., De Clercq E., Elger B. S. (2019). Big Data and discrimination: perils, promises and solutions. A systematic review. Journal of Big Data, 6 (12).
Fuchs, C. (2017). From digital positivism and administrative big data analytics towards critical digital and social media research. European Journal of Communication, 32(1), 37-49.
Fuchs, C. (2019). What is critical digital social research? Five reflections on the study of digital society. Journal of Digital Social Research, 1(81), 10-16.
Halford, S., Savage, M. (2017), Speaking sociologically with big data: Symphonic social science and the future for big data research. Sociology, LI, 6, 1132-1148.
Marres, N. Weltevrede, E. (2013). Scraping the social? Issues in live social research. Journal of Cultural Economy, 6(3), 313-335.
O’Neil, C. (2016), Weapons of Math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy, London, Penguin.
Veltri G.A. (2017). Big Data is not only about data: The two cultures of modelling. Big Data & Society, 4, 1, 1-6.
Veltri, G.A. (2019). Digital Social Research, Cambridge, Polity Press. Zafarani R., Abbasi M. A., Liu H. (2014). Social Media Mining. An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.