Evans, James and Pedro Aceves. 2016. “Machine Translation: Mining Text for Social Theory”. Annual Review of Sociology 42:21-50. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-soc-081715-074206
I find the methods and the sample research cases in the article very interesting. However, at this point, it seems confusing to me which method would be a better fit for which type of research question. For example, I am interested in a specific type of YouTube videos and why people watch them for my research question this year. I wonder if I should focus on content, social relationships or the social states. I hope to have a better sense of this as weeks evolve.
Another question in my mind is about computation techniques' relationship to social sciences in general. You have mentioned that data mining has a bad reputation due to cases of overstretching the findings. Even though we have better techniques today, it is a question to me where we should stop with the data and put the human researcher back in the picture. This is not a specific but more like a philosophy of science question, but I am genuinely interested in the limits of computation and where we should draw the line to still stay "human".
I find the methods and the sample research cases in the article very interesting. However, at this point, it seems confusing to me which method would be a better fit for which type of research question. For example, I am interested in a specific type of YouTube videos and why people watch them for my research question this year. I wonder if I should focus on content, social relationships or the social states. I hope to have a better sense of this as weeks evolve.
Another question in my mind is about computation techniques' relationship to social sciences in general. You have mentioned that data mining has a bad reputation due to cases of overstretching the findings. Even though we have better techniques today, it is a question to me where we should stop with the data and put the human researcher back in the picture. This is not a specific but more like a philosophy of science question, but I am genuinely interested in the limits of computation and where we should draw the line to still stay "human".