Suchergebnisse

The future of ethnography in the Big Data era
By taking an ethnographic viewpoint, Beuving explores knowledge claims about Big Data (BD) as discussed in Seth Stephens-Davidowitz' best-selling book Everybody Lies (2017). It portrays BD in a way that evokes affinity with ethnography: as a naturalistic research practice that makes small subpopulations visible and discloses people's hidden motives. But for Beuving this threefold assertion appears to rest on misguided conceptions. For the ethnographic researcher, naturalism refers to a reflexive practice, yet the BD researcher associates it with researcher invisibility. And the term population, which has a statistical meaning in BD, has a strong theoretical connotation in ethnography. Finally, motives in BD are about direct interpretation of revealed preferences as social facts, whereas the ethnographer considers them to be expressions of social behavior that require a Verstehende interpretation.
Bosch sees the relation of ethnography and Big Data research as a new form of Methodenstreit, which urges qualitative researchers to develop and apply user-oriented analysis techniques. Gigengack stresses that ethnography and Big Data are in fact incompatible. They should not be seen as methodological rivals in understanding society and social conduct. Ethnography and Big Data analyses are different perspectives on the social world. Ethnography should study the world of Internet behavior as it studies religious rites or societal identities.

What makes a happy city? How can a city respond adequately and resiliently to a crisis disrupting civic society? Answers to these timeless questions differ through time. A Miracle of St Martin – Utrecht a Happy City tells the story of Utrecht and St Martin. At the occasion of Utrecht's 900th anniversary as a free city, the book elucidates how the bond between Utrecht and its patron saint since the early Middle Ages inspired people to contribute to a happy city.
The book is designed as a diptych, focusing first on St Martin's Utrecht patronage around the year 900, when the settlement built within the walls of the former Roman castellum endured difficult times due to political and climatological troubles. Bishop Radbod (899/900-917) calls upon his fellow citizens to cultivate the commemoration of St Martin and to appeal to the saintly figure in times of hardship. The book includes a translation of Radbod's Miracle Story of St Martin and unravels the secrets of his Gregorian office for the summer feast of St Martin's Translation on July 4th.
The second part of the book focuses on St Martin's role in the multicultural twenty-first-century city of Utrecht. The popular St Martin's Parade establishes a new celebration of the saint with music, street art and a parade of lights. Reflecting on this newly (re-)invented tradition we discover St Martin anew as a symbolic figure representing values of the inclusive city in past and present.
The book is lavishly illustrated with images of St Martin and his cult in medieval and modern-day Utrecht.

Reinoud Bosch en Roy Gigengack reiken beiden interessante gezichtspunten aan in reactie op mijn vraag naar de naturalistische kennisaanspraken van BD en de consequenties voor kwalitatief onderzoek/etnografie. Bosch omarmt, net als ikzelf, een meer filosofisch-pragmatisch perspectief waarin BD en etnografie prima naast elkaar kunnen bestaan. Daarbij is het vanzelfsprekend dat beide vanuit verschillende onderzoeksproblemen vertrekken: de statistische beschrijving van gedrag/sociale rollen versus het van binnenuit begrijpen daarvan. Zoals we betogen in ons boek (Beuving & De Vries, 2015), zijn beide nodig om samenlevingen te begrijpen: sociale feiten (Durkheim) en betekenissen (Thomas) zijn onderling afhankelijk. Het wederzijds afdwingen van een methodische benadering en conceptueel kader is dan uiteraard weinig vruchtbaar. De groeiende digitalisering van de samenleving verandert maar weinig aan de geldigheid van dat fundamentele sociaalwetenschappelijke principe, hoewel er wel praktische methodische consequenties zijn – een discussie die we eerder al weleens in KWALON voerden (bijv. Warmelink, Beuving & Wester, 2015).