Robert Ackland - Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age

WEB SOCIAL SCIENCE

For Kazuko

WEB SOCIAL SCIENCE

CONCEPTS, DATA AND TOOLS FOR SOCIAL SCIENTISTS IN THE DIGITAL AGE

ROBERT ACKLAND

SAGE Publications Ltd
1 Olivers Yard
55 City Road
London EC1Y 1SP

SAGE Publications Inc.
2455 Teller Road
Thousand Oaks, California 91320

SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd
B 1/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area
Mathura Road
New Delhi 110 044

SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd
3 Church Street
#10-04 Samsung Hub
Singapore 049483

Editor: Chris Rojek

Editorial assistant: Martine Jonsrud
Production editor: Katherine Haw
Copyeditor: Richard Leigh
Proofreader: Jonathan Hopkins
Indexer: Cathryn Pritchard
Marketing manager: Alison Borg
Cover design: Lisa Harper
Typeset by: C&M Digitals (P) Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed in India by Replika Press Pvt Ltd

Robert Ackland 2013

First published 2013

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-84920-481-1
ISBN 978-1-84920-482-8 (pbk)

Robert Ackland is an Associate Professor in the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute at the Australian National University. He has degrees in economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University (where he was a Fulbright Scholar) and the ANU, where he gained his PhD in 2001. Prior to commencing his PhD, which was on index number theory in the context of cross-country comparisons of income and poverty, Robert worked as a researcher in the Australian Department of Immigration and an economist in the Policy Research Department at the World Bank, based in Washington, DC, 199597. Since 2002 Robert has been working in the fields of network science, computational social science and web science, with a particular focus on quantitative analysis of online social and organisational networks. He has given over 50 academic presentations in this area and his research has appeared in journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Social Networks,Computational Economics, Social Science Computer Review and the Journal of Social Structure. Robert leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks project (http://voson.anu.edu.au), and teaches on the social science of the Internet, statistics, and online research methods. He has been chief investigator on four Australian Research Council grants, and in 2007 he was both a UK National Centre for e-Social Science Visiting Fellow and James Martin Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. In 2011, he was appointed a member of the Science Council of the Web Foundations Web Index project.

This book aims to provide students, researchers and practitioners with the theory and methods for understanding the web as a socially constructed phenomenon that both reflects social, economic and political processes and, in turn, impacts on these processes. Specifically, readers of this book will:

There are three main motivations for social scientific research into behaviour on the web. First, it can be argued that behaviour on the web is a unique cultural form that deserves to be documented and understood. This is more a perspective taken in virtual ethnography, for example, and it is not central to the present book. Second, it may be the case that some behaviour on the web is similar enough to offline behaviour, that its study can provide new insights into the offline behaviour. This perspective is a strong one in this book. Finally, social science research into web behaviour has been motivated by the need to understand whether certain online behaviour may have effects in the real world, that is, that there may be a social impact of the web. This motivation is again an important aspect of this book.

Since the early days of the Internet there has been research into its social, political and economic impacts, with contributions from a range of disciplines: media and cultural studies, communications, economics, political science, sociology, law and public policy. So what does this book offer that is new or different? What sets web social science apart from other approaches for studying the web?

On the face of it, it would appear that the Internet has had a huge influence on the way we live our lives it would seem that it has transformed the way we work, collaborate, engage in commerce, participate in the political process and interact socially. However, it is useful to keep in mind the words of the social historian Claude S. Fischer:

Visions of new technologies revolutionizing the way we live are often bold, sweeping, and millenarian. They are exciting to hear; they sell books; they can earn one a good living on the corporate lecture circuit. But their shelf-life is roughly equivalent to that of a Big Mac ... we ought to think more about these technologies as tools people use to pursue their social ends than as forces that control peoples actions. (Fischer, 1997: 115)

This is not to say that the Internet has had no social impacts, but rather that the real-world impacts of the Internet are likely to be complex and hard to disentangle from other major forces, for example demographic and economic, that are affecting patterns of communication and community.

So if we agree with Fischers view (in 1997, note) that the Internet has not controlled peoples actions but has rather provided tools to allow people to pursue their social ends, the implication is that the Internet can provide new data sources for studying human behaviour. As a tool for communication, the web differs from the telephone in that interactions between people often lead to digital trace data that can be used for research: email repositories, archives of posts on forum sites and blog sites, and profiles in social network sites such as Facebook.