Virtual SODAS Data Discussion w/ Kristoffer Albris, Morten Axel Pedersen & Anders Blok

Copenhagen Center for Social Data Science (SODAS), is pleased to announce that we are continuing with SODAS Data Discussions this spring.

SODAS aspirers to be a resource for all students and researchers at the Faculty of Social Sciences. We therefor invite researchers across the faculty to present ongoing research projects, project applications or just a loose idea that relates to the subject of social data science.

Every month two researchers will present their work. The rules are simple: short research presentations of ten minutes are followed by twenty minutes of debate. No papers will be circulated beforehand, and the presentations cannot be longer than five slides.

Assistant Professor at Department of Anthropology, Kristoffer Albris, and Deputy Director of SODAS and Professor of Anthropology, Morten Axel Pedersen, will present to us their work on the ERC funded project, DISTRACT. They are followed by Associate Professor at Department of Sociology, Anders Blok, who will present his work on green communities in the cities.

Morten Axel Pedersen & Kristoffer Albris: DISTRACT: Combining Data Science and Social Science Methods and Research Techniques

In this data discussion we will present the newly started ERC project DISTRACT – The Political Economy of Distraction in Digitized Denmark. While the substantial aspect of the project concerns the ever more alluring distractions of human attention in the age of smartphones and other digitized technologies, this presentation will focus on the project’s methodological aspirations, namely to combine data science tools and established social science forms of analysis. We present the four subprojects that make up DISTRACT, and how they each attempt to employ methods and research techniques from the quali-quant continuum.

Anders Blok: The place of greening: comparing civic engagement scenes of urban natures in Denmark via digital methods

In this paper, we deploy digital methods to map out the engagement styles, inter-group co-engagement networks, and wider socio-geographical value landscapes of 130 grassroots- and volunteer-based urban green communities across the four largest cities in Denmark: Aalborg, Odense, Aarhus, and Copenhagen. In doing so, we develop the concept of ‘civic engagement scenes’, in dialogue with recent moves in cultural and political sociology meant to capture different patterns of civic coordination, adding to this a specific interest in how such civic styles give rise to particular patterns of material, emplaced, and socio-spatial co-engagement. This descriptive analysis, we argue, in turn help forge new comparative hypotheses as concerns the key factors involved in producing specific civic urban nature agendas in specific cities, hence aiding in attempts to specify key varieties of civic urban natures and their forms of governance.

The SODAS Data Discussion will take place in Zoom from 11.00 am to 12.00 noon.

If you want to attend the event or just want to know more, please write Sophie Smitt Sindrup Grønning at sophie.groenning@sodas.ku.dk.