Abstract
In their edited volume, Ethnography for a Data-Saturated World, Hannah Know and Dawn Nafus bring to our attention the core philosophical and methodological considerations that digital data entail. They focus specifically on ontological and epistemological questions that one may encounter when mixing data science and ethnography in empirical research, ‘big’ and ‘small’ or ‘thick’ data, to better understand our lives and societies. While the book’s contributions are predominantly written from the perspective of anthropology, the core philosophical discussions of the status of ‘the digital’ and of digital data in knowledge production, as well as on what has been labelled ‘the social life of methods’ should be of considerable interest to other social science research, including media and communication research.
The book is premised on the observation of a surprising scarcity of ‘grounded empirical studies of the knowledge practices entailed in contemporary data analytics’ (p. 3). This lack is particularly notable, one might suggest, given the current blossoming of the theoretical critique of datafication. Empirical studies may offer significant advances in our understanding of ‘the cultures, practices and infrastructures and epistemologies of digital data production, analysis and use’ (p. 3). Exactly how do data infrastructures, capture and processing work in a given context, with what purposes and what effects? We still know so little about the concrete mechanisms and fragilities of all the digital systems that guide our day-to-day being in the world.
Knox and Nafus extend the idea of the social life of methods to argue that expertise is reconstituted, perhaps reconfigured in digital data work. Social media, operating in opaque ways through automation logics, offer an illuminating example to ponder who gets to produce knowledge and gain authority at all. Experiments from below, for example, with citizen science through everyday uses of data (as with the case of the Quantified Self community) offer a similar redefinition of what methods and digital data might imply for knowledge production, expertise and power in science and society.
The edited volume is organized in three main parts, each comprising three to four chapters. The first part presents examples of ethnographies of data science, where researchers have ventured into field sites reflective of certain ‘cultures’ of data science, including national statistics, university programmes in data science and the invigoration of mythologies of data among developers promoting a new digital economy in Jamaica. The second part delves into ontological and epistemological debates about digital data, and the claims to expertise they involve. The third part offers reflections on combining big and thick data based on interdisciplinary experiments with data ethnography. In sum, the book is committed to pushing the study of digital data and the methods for datafying social life towards stronger empirical grounding and engagement, at once positioning data as object and methods of study. It will be a valuable source for methodological reflection and inspiration for empirical research with digital data.