scholarly journals Social Science Perspective on Artificial Intelligence

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Lindgren ◽  
Jonny Holmström
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Building Blocks ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Societal Context ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Human Actors

In this article, we discuss and outline a research agenda for social science research on artificial intelligence. We present four overlapping building blocks that we see as keys for developing a perspective on AI able to unpack the rich complexities of sociotechnical settings. First, the interaction between humans and machines must be studied in its broader societal context. Second, technological and human actors must be seen as social actors on equal terms. Third, we must consider the broader discursive settings in which AI is socially constructed as a phenomenon with related hopes and fears. Fourth, we argue that constant and critical reflection is needed over how AI, algorithms and datafication affect social science research objects and methods. This article serves as the introduction to this JDSR special issue about social science perspectives on AI.

scholarly journals The Ground They Walk On: Photography and Narrative Inquiry

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Ketelle
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Research Method ◽  
School Principals ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Novel Variation

In this project, the author explores a novel variation on an established social science research method, photo-elicitation. The author photographed eight school principals during a two-year period and asked the principals to respond to the photographs by writing narratives below each. The author uses photography, reflections, and her own memories to construct descriptive narrative snapshots of the eight principals. Further, the author argues that this approach underscores how photographs are both technically and socially constructed and through the use of photo-elicitation new ways of understanding self and others in relation can be explored.

Missionary Archives and Historical-Anthropological Research

Itinerario ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119
Author(s):  
Dick Kooiman
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
African Studies ◽  
Anthropological Research ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The University

In the summer of 1992 the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London hosted a workshop that deserves the interest of the readers of Itinerario. It was a workshop on missionary archives exclusively meant to explore the rich potential of these missionary sources for social science research. The initiative for this two-day study-conference was taken by the historian David Arnold and the archivist Rosemary Seton, both of them associated with SOAS.

Denial and Acknowledgment in Serbia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diane Orentlicher
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Motivated Reasoning ◽  
Framing Effects ◽  
False Beliefs ◽  
Public Opinion Surveys ◽  
The Rich

A paramount hope of Serbians who supported the ICTY was that its judgments would convince Serbian society that Serbs committed mass atrocities with extensive support from the Serbian government, and would persuade Serbia’s citizens and government to condemn those crimes unequivocally. During the first five or six years following the collapse of the Milošević regime, there was palpable progress in this sphere, a trend many Serbians believe the ICTY influenced. More recent years have, however, seen a rise in denialism. This chapter explores factors that account for each of these trends. Its conclusions reflect the rich insights of Serbians who administered periodic public opinion surveys, as well as social science research illuminating dynamics behind entrenched yet false beliefs, such as confirmation biases, motivated reasoning, social identity, heuristics, and framing effects.

Disambiguating and Specifying Social Actors in Big Data: Using Wikipedia as a Data Source for Demographic Information

2019 ◽  
pp. 004912411988248
Author(s):  
Philipp Poschmann ◽  
Jan Goldenstein
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Software Architecture ◽  
Social Action ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Demographic Information ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Text Corpora ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
Data Source

Despite the recent and ongoing progress in using text-mining tools to automatically analyze large text corpora, there remains significant potential to facilitate the study of social action in social science research. In this context, particularly the disambiguation (who is referred to in a text?) and specification (which demographic characteristics are present?) of social actors—currently a manual job—remains a challenge. This article demonstrates a reliable and accurate software architecture for social scientists who are interested in automatically detecting, disambiguating, and demographically specifying social actors (i.e., persons and organizations) in large text collections. The backbone of our software architecture is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia as a currently unexploited data source of a large amount of accurately prepared information. We illustrate how our software architecture detects and disambiguates social actors in large text corpora and retrieves their respective demographic information. Overall, we evaluate the reliability and accuracy of our software architecture across seven different social settings and facilitate an intuitive sense of the comprehensive applicability of our software architecture. We end by not only highlighting the benefits of our software architecture for social science research but also pointing to the limitations of using Wikipedia as a data source.

Systems Development as a Research Act

1999 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Hughes ◽  
Trevor Wood-Harper
Keyword(s):  
Social Science ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Systems Development ◽  
Information Systems Development ◽  
Interpretive Research ◽  
Sociological Perspective ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Requirements Determination ◽  
Action Case

In this paper we argue that for systems developers who intervene in organizationally dependent phases of information systems development, such as requirements determination, then the engagement with social actors may be considered to be an interpretive research act. The argument is illustrated by action case studies in which one of the authors intervened in two situations with an explicit sociological perspective and analysis methods more usually associated with qualitative social science research. We argue that this places an onus on systems developers to be both explicit in their assumptions and critically reflective in their thinking.

scholarly journals Photography in Social Science Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 62
Author(s):  
Carlos Miguel Ferreira ◽  
Sandro Serpa
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Visual Communication ◽  
Social Science Research ◽  
Science Research ◽  
Technical Aspects ◽  
Research Results ◽  
Socially Constructed

Visual communication is critical in contemporary societies. Research in social sciences increasingly tends to mobilize the image, for example, in the form of photography, in its processes (in the collection and interpretation of information) and products (in the communication of research results), which leads to the need to reflect critically on its specificities. This paper aims to add to the analysis of the potentialities, limitations and challenges of the use of photography in social sciences research. For this purpose, the paper presents and discusses empirically collected documentary expressions, selected from an organizational case study based on their heuristic capacity to illustrate the argumentation put forth herein. It is concluded that the potential of the use of photography in research in social sciences is high, but it is essential that the researcher considers, besides more technical aspects and ethical complexities, that photography is, in part, also the materialization of a certain socially constructed representation of reality.

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