Pedersen & Albris: Social science in a digitalized world

In the research of social sciences and the digital reality, Morten and Kristoffer will tell about how new types of data and methods change and expand the possibilities of research. This will be unraveled /discussed in three parts: Firstly, an examination on why most anthropologists are solely interested in ethnographic and qualitative methods? Can’t there be a quantitative anthropology? This will be illuminated further in a discussion of how ethnography and quantitative methods can be complimentary, exemplified in a Ph.D.-project about disaster preparedness. Lastly, all of these considerations will be brought into relevance in a presentation of the ERC-financed project: DISTRACT (The Political Economy of Attention in Politicized Denmark), which involves a wide range of methods: both traditionally ethnographic fieldwork, machine learning and other data sciences.