With social life increasingly happening online, and the concomitant outburst of available of data, digital technologies provide new avenues to collect and analyse big data. A wide range of researchers and disciplines have progressively adopted digital methods to ask new questions and produce new data. However, big data also raises a series of issues for researchers, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, including (1) data collection and systematisation (quality and reliability); (2) data interpretation (e.g. generalisability of findings; algorithmic bias); (3) research ethics (issues of consent, storage and data protection) and (4) the more general impact of big data on research agendas, methodologies and epistemologies. This workshop brings together the research community of the Institute to engage with these issues.
Speaker
Tommaso Venturini, Associate Professor in digital methods at the University of Geneva, researcher at the Centre Internet et Société of the CNRS and founder of the PublicDataLab.
Discussants
Grégoire Mallard, Professor Anthropology and Sociology Department, Head of Research.
Oana Ichim, Postdoctoral Researcher, Global Governance Centre.
“Hot Topics in Research” is a new series of talks and roundtables organised by the Research Office to discuss trends, innovations and pivotal issues in academic research.