Prototyping Social Sciences: Emplacing Digital Methods

Research methods in the social sciences has a history of intense development during the twentieth century. The historical accounts that describe the invention of interview methods, survey techniques, and modern ethnography have demonstrated that social researchers and scholars have exerted great effort in aid of their development. In the twenty-first century, the conditions for the invention of new research methods have been radically transformed with the extension of digital technologies. Many blogs and websites display tag clouds, a technology based upon textual analysis techniques; no less widely spread are the technologies for visualizing hyperlink patterns that draw on the technique of social network analysis. These are but two examples of technologies developed by non-scholars that are based on the application of social science research methods. Noortje Marres (2012) has described this process with the notion of redistribution of methods, highlighting the fact that research methods are now used and even produced anew by people with no formal credentials in the social sciences.