How technical is technology research
From Driscollwiki
Sandvig, C. (2009) How technical is technology research? Acquiring and deploying technical knowledge in social research projects. In Hargittai, E. (Ed.) Research confidential, pp. 141-163. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Contents |
Reflecting on a situation
- High expectations, tight timetable, short money (142)
- Visiting people who were building community comm infrastructure
- Researcher uses technical knowledge to unravel a ruse
- What was presented as a success was vaporware
"By knowing the architecture of their specific network and knowing about the significance of a pattern of lights on a piece of hardware, I knew a crucial thing about their project that they would not have told me" (144).
Relationship of tech knowledge to social research
- "The issue of technical knowledge is consequential for researchers studying technology using any method" (145)
- (I might extend this to include tech-mediated phenomena)
- Technology studies
- Offshoot of 1980s STS, see: MacKenzie and Wajc
- Research has its own specialized knowledge
- Should the researcher also become an expert in tech?
"Near native": The ethnographic gold standard
"good ethnography" in the area of technology requires that "the ethnographer develops near native competence in the technical aspects of the science and technology involved" (Hess 2001, 239) (as quoted on 147)
"The standard of near native competence does not mean that one necessarily could pass, for example, a general doctoral exam that covers a wide variety of subfields in, for example, biology. Rather, the technical competence of the fieldworker tends to be narrow band - limited to specific subfields - where one's control of the literature is equivalent to that of the experts, and in some cases, superior to it ... This is a high standard that often requires years of research" (The Sage Handbook of Ethnography, 239) (as quoted on 147)
- How does one acquire this domain-specific knowledge? (147)
- Read trade or technical litrature?
- Or social science/ theory about related tech?
- Any of these avenues is very time costly (147)
- Value of admitting failure, confusion
- Reading the accounts of others who do (148)
Credentials?
- Additional credentials (degrees, etc) might seem like they help overcome "imposter syndrom" but do they really help?
- There is always going to be something you don't know when the field is not your own
- Law is a field that values credentials
- IP law suggests that lawyers have a BS in something technical (149)
- STS undergrad majors often require double-major or significant coursework in STEM (150)
"Happy ignorance" (150)
- Learning as much as possible while in the field
- But open to making mistakes, productive mistakes
- Knowledge cycles are short!
- ~2 years in comm
- Thus a degree may actually not be the most effective path (150-1)
- It is valuable to know HOW people learn things (153)
- "Practical disability is turned into a methodological advantage" (Lynch, 1982, 509) as quoted on (154)
Focusing on the sociality
- Not about "what does this acronym mean?"
- But "What does this acronym mean to them? (161)
Sources
- Newsfeeds
- Blogs
- HOWTO books like O'Reilly
- Humility and admission of ignorance (152)
Getting hung up on particulars
- The research isn't about this or that technology
- It is about the underlying theory or process (158)
- Related error is writing too much about the technology
- Becoming a hybrid
- Neither serving the social sciences, nor the technologies under investigation (160)
