[ecrea] CFP - Making sense of small and big data as onlife traces _ NORDICOM Review

Call for papers: NORDICOM Review/ (OPEN ACCESS)

Making sense of small and big data as onlife traces

Special issue editors: Anja Bechmann, Associate Professor at Aarhus 
University & Visiting Assoc. Professor at UCI and Kjetil Sandvik, 
Associate Professor at University of Copenhagen.

/Onlife/designates the transformational reality that in contemporary 
developed societies, our offline and online experiences and lives are 
inextricably interwoven (Simon & Ess 2015). Our /onlives/ produce 
digital traces or footprints, some of which are produced before birth by 
our parents and continue to exist even after our death (in the shape of 
registers, bank accounts, social media profiles etc.). This special 
issue of /Nordicom Review/ examines and discusses how we create meaning 
in and make sense of small and big data as onlife traces. The fields of 
qualitative and quantitative studies are often depicted as each other’s 
counterpart. Yet, when researchers study onlife as a way of 
conceptualizing the digital layer of our lives, we meet similar 
obstacles. One of the major questions is how can we infer meaning from 
the digital traces made by the user to the actual use/praxis or partial 
to the human(s) behind (incentives, motives, needs)? This is a classical 
methodological question within communication and behavioural studies 
that has a renewed interest in the digital social sciences as we 
discover methodological trajectories into the onlife, be it studies of 
Internet of Things, apps (e.g. social media, games, self-trackers), or 
other digital communication and behaviours as traces of digital sociology.

Both small and big data studies approaches have tried to ‘solve’ this 
problem of inference by suggesting triangulation as methodological 
approach. Within big data studies more data on more users, multiple data 
points or data over a longer time span on the same user are used to 
create more ‘clear signals’ and to strengthen the predictions of the 
motives, ideologies, incentives, and needs of a specific user. 
Qualitative studies use for instance multisided ethnography and 
methodological triangulation to heighten the validity of findings when 
it comes to clearly understand the user and the use behind onlife traces.

In a time where user data have become sharable and tradable commodities 
and where governments, media, health and financial sectors build actions 
and decisions on top of predictions inferred from data traces of human 
communication and behaviour in digital spaces it is maybe more important 
than ever to understand and discuss not if we can make a solid 
one-to-one interpretation, but how we can advance our inferences or at 
least explicitly discuss in various studies how we have solved or coped 
with this issue by advancing our research questions, our methodological 
approaches, philosophical background or conceptual understanding.

We are interested in papers that study onlife empirically and – in this 
connection – discuss the methods used to infer meaning from data traces 
to the usage or users behind. Furthermore, we are looking for empirical 
studies that use and discuss methods to extract meaningful 
(sociological) findings out of small and big data and discuss the 
methodological challenges in doing so. We are also looking for 
philosophical and theoretical contribution (on e.g. AI reasoning) and 
historical contribution tracking methodological or theoretical 
conceptualizations of ‘meaning’ and sense-making in combination with 
traces of use within the framework of understanding digital traces in a 
sociological perspective. Furthermore, we encourage ethnographic papers 
studying developers’ work processes when extracting meaning from massive 
data and acting on top of such predictions. Contributions are not 
expected to ‘solve’ the ‘meaning’ problem, but by sampling a selection 
of papers that explicitly discuss this issue in various empirical 
contexts we hope the special issue can point to further directions in 
the field of digital sociology. As such, contributors are urged to 
relate their proposals to the concepts of meaning- and sense-making 
taking into account that meaning-making is more than a methodological, 
theoretical and philosophical concept: it is related to how we 
empirically propose understandings of big as well as small data.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

-empirical studies of digital traces within a sociological framework

-empirical or theoretical studies on transmissions from user data to 
actual usage

-empirical studies of cross-platform usage as indicators of digital user 
practices

-empirical studies or theoretical studies of representation in big data 
analysis and relations between big data and small data

-empirical studies of algorithms and media platform usage

-theoretical and methodological discussions on digital sociology, e.g. 
(lack of) context sensitivity in machine learning (e.g. neural networks 
or clustering models) applied to digital sociology

-historical accounts of ‘meaning’ and ‘reasoning’ in AI, and of 
‘meaning’ and ‘sense-making’ in qualitative studies within digital sociology

-human-machine communication studies of bots

-STS studies of developers’ work processes with big data and machine 
learning; critical discussions on internet profiling, algorithms and AI; 
auditing studies of machine learning algorithms; ontologies and (lack 
of) classifiers in big data and associated machine learning methods


Key dates:

1 September 2017: Deadline for abstracts (max. 500 words, excl. 
references, and additionally a short author bio, max. 150 words). Send 
submissions to:Anja <mailto:(anjabechmann /at/ cc.au.dk)>andKjetil 
<mailto:(sandvik /at/ hum.ku.dk)> with the text “Abstract proposal for Nordicom 
Special Issue 2018” in the subject line.

1 November 2017: Notification of authors.

1 April 2018: Deadline for full papers (7000 words).

1 June 2018: reviewers’ comments for the authors

1 September 2018: Revised versions from the authors

Preliminary date for publication: Winther 2018/2019

All full papers will undergo double-blind peer review, and acceptance of 
an abstract does not guarantee publication.


For questions regarding the special issue, contact: Anja Bechmann 
<mailto:(anjabechmann /at/ cc.au.dk)>and Kjetil Sandvik <mailto:(sandvik /at/ hum.ku.dk)>

For questions regarding Nordicom Review, contact:Ingela Wadbring.

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