Stitching together the heterogeneous party: A complementary social data science experiment

摘要

The era of ?￠????big data?￠???? studies and computational social science has recently given rise to a number of realignments within and beyond the social sciences, where otherwise distinct data formats ?￠???? digital, numerical, ethnographic, visual, etc. ?￠???? rub off and emerge from one another in new ways. This article chronicles the collaboration between a team of anthropologists and sociologists, who worked together for one week in an experimental attempt to combine ?￠????big?￠???? transactional and ?￠????small?￠???? ethnographic data formats. Our collaboration is part of a larger cross-disciplinary project carried out at the Danish Technical University (DTU), where high-resolution transactional data from smartphones allows for recordings of social networks amongst a freshman class (N = 800). With a parallel deployment of ethnographic fieldwork among the DTU students, this research set-up raises a number of questions concerning how to assemble disparate ?￠????data-worlds?￠???? and to what epistemological and political effects? To address these questions, a specific social event ?￠???? a lively student party ?￠???? was singled out from the broader DTU dataset. Our experimental collaboration used recordings of Bluetooth signals between students?￠???? phones to visualize the ebb and flow of social intensities at the DTU party, juxtaposing these with ethnographic field-notes on shifting party atmospheres. Tracing and reflecting on the process of combining heterogeneous data, the article offers a concrete case of how a ?￠????stitching together?￠???? of digital and ethnographic data-worlds might take place.