Computer-based methods such as network analysis, text and data mining or computer simulation are becoming increasingly relevant against the background of technological change. They allow large masses of digital behavioural traces to be systematically analysed. But they also bring methodological, data-analytical and research-ethical challenges. This relates directly to the question of the extent to which CSS requires a specific methodology (incl. specific quality criteria of scientific research and research ethics guidelines) that does justice to its data sets and methods of analysis.
Since CSS is currently still often accused of being distant from theory, challenges also concern CSS’s relationship to social science theories. Under the motto “Towards a Computational Social Science”, the working group will consider questions about the interplay between the partly specific theoretical perspectives of CSS, its possible interfaces with established social science theories and a methodology developing from them, and discuss them with relevant experts at CAIS. The aim is to reflect on the consequences of the increasing use of computer-based data collection and analysis methods for the further development of the empirical social sciences.
CAIS sees itself as a place of innovative interdisciplinary research and as a source of impulses for a critical science that faces the opportunities and risks of digitalisation. We use the funding from the CAIS to organise a series of workshops with relevant international and national experts as well as a one-week retreat. In deliberately small groups, we focus together with the experts on content-related, theoretical, methodological and research ethics challenges in the research field.
In the context of knowledge transfer, we plan to bundle the discussion that unfolded during the colloquium afterwards, to further differentiate it and to develop a contribution format on this basis so that we can also make our results accessible to the scientific community. Specifically, we are currently working on a first journal article in which the participants of the theory workshop will contribute.
Main research areas
- Internet research
- Big Data
- Computational Social Science Methods
- Network Analysis
- Automated Content Analysis
- Web Tracking
- Theories of the digitalised public sphere