SODAS Lecture Series: Mixed Methods in The Digital Age

It has been noted by many that digital data affords new ways of combining data sources and methods, especially across the qualitative and quantitative divide. Many forms of digital data allow the researcher to reconstruct a detailed account of both the context and content of social interaction, while at the same time allowing for inquiry into aggregated patterns at the level of populations. This allows close integration of qualitative and quantitative modes of inquiry -something which has led to excitementaround the social sciences and related disciplines. Social scientists have combined qualitative in-depth text analysis with automated machine learning to make interpretatively valid and large scale inference about the dynamics of culture. Others have combined sensory data from mobile phones together with participant observation to investigate technology use, party sociality and more. These promising new ways of combining methods have jet to be formulated into paradigmatic methodologies and many of the problems and potentials are yet to be unpacked. In this SODAS spring lecture series we have invited a series of speakers to address various aspects of mixing methods in the digital age, through either methodological arguments or exemplar mixed methods studies.


Title, abstract and presentation to be announced.