To RSVP, please email Dr Elena Minina. 

Social sciences, including corpus studies, have long grappled with the relationship between qualitative and quantitative research. As the quantification of our societies intensifies and the need to move beyond the qualitative/quantitative divide becomes more urgent, Simon Lindgren advances an argument towards developing a critical science of data, by bringing together the interpretive theoretical and ethical sensibilities of social science and the predictive and prognostic powers of data science and computational methods.

Simon argues that the renegotiation of theories and research methods that must be made in order for them to be more relevant and useful can be fruitfully understood through the metaphor of hacking social science: developing creative ways of exploiting existing tools in alternative and unexpected ways to solve research problems. This can be, for example, through leveraging machine learning methods, such as topic modelling or word embeddings in corpus analysis, to achieve 'distant readings', while retaining elements of 'close reading' and critical theoretical analysis. The talk will cover both the conceptual and hands-on aspects, and will be of interest to a broad range of corpus and data science researchers.

Speakers

Simon Lindgren is Professor of Sociology at Umeå University, Sweden. His research is about the relationship between digital technologies and society. Lindgren studies the transformative role of digital communication technologies (internet and social media), and the consequences of datafication, algorithms and AI, with a particular focus on politics and power relations. He uses combinations of methods from computational social science and network science, and analytical frameworks from interpretive sociology and critical theory.

Lindgren’s books include Data Theory (2020), Digital Media and Society (2017; 2022), and New Noise (2013). More information can be found at www.simonlindgren.com

Bibliography

Lindgren, S. (2021). Digital media and society. Sage.

Lindgren, S. (2020). Data theory: Interpretive sociology and computational methods. John Wiley & Sons.

Lindgren, S. (2013). New noise: A cultural sociology of digital disruption. Peter Lang Publishing Group.

This event was part of the Corpus research in linguistics and beyond seminar series.