Just-in-Time Sociology (JITSO) workshop just concluded

06Dec12

I was yesterday at the Just-in-Time-Sociology (JITSO) workshop in Lausanne (oh, how I still like this town, after such a long time!). JITSO was a small-scale, nice and friendly event for like-minded social researchers, who feel the urge to use their baggage of theories and techniques to provide science-informed responses to today’s fast-paced social, political and economic events. JITSO may mean attempting rapid, but still research-based, reactions to events that require immediate policy decisions, and for which the social sciences have been traditionally ill-prepared. This is, for example, what Antonio Casilli and I endeavoured to do with our study of the UK riots in August last year. JITSO may also mean documenting events as they unfold, before their digital traces disappear. It is the case of all those studies of the Internet and social media whose empirical basis shifts daily -not only because people change and evolve (this would be common to all types of social science data), but also because the few big firms that dominate the IT market change their rules, terms of use, and practices so frequently. An example is the analysis of the French blogosphere of persons with eating disorders, which I am undertaking with Antonio Casilli and Fred Pailler in the ANAMIA research project.

Two major issues appeared yesterday. One is the sustainability and durability of research projects originated as “just-in-time” ones. Rapid response papers are necessarily imperfect or incomplete, precisely because they need to be put together in such a short time; so they require integration in a longer term perspective, aiming at theoretical refinement and empirical validation. But over time, media enthusiasm may fade away, expected sources of funding may not materialize, data may be difficult or expensive to collect, and ethical committees may become more conservative in granting authorizations to projects such as these, which typically have strong political orientation (and implications).

The other issue is the availability of data. Internet firms and social networking services are understanding more and more clearly the economic value of data, and are more and more reluctant to give them away for free. This is creating increasing obstacles for research programmes that need these data as digital traces allowing to keep track of, and reconstitute, ongoing social change. There needs to be some strong political action to prevent this from happening .

The difficulties are clear, but the good thing is that the JITSO programme of research has a lot of freshness and willingness to go ahead, not least by exploring new modes of peer-reviewing and publication. Not all the methods or topics are new, of course, but the approach has finally become explicit, and as such, potentially recognised. I look forward to future editions of JITSO -though it’s not yet clear when, or where.

The slides of my keynote speech are available here.

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