Digital platforms as socio-cultural artifacts: developing digital methods for cultural research

ABSTRACT

Social media platforms are increasingly looked at as means to investigate social phenomena like collective events, issues or causes. Digital methods – techniques exclusively focused on online data and shaped by the environment hosting these data – have become part and parcel of these investigations, often approaching platforms as hybrid assemblages of users, infrastructures, and algorithms. In its ‘online groundness’, this type of digital methods research, however, often tends to skim over the socio-cultural, contextual dimension of both wider social phenomena and social media uses and practices. In this paper, we advance a threefold contribution aimed at both sparking future efforts to address this limitation and aligning digital methods inquiry with contemporary epistemological debates that counter universalistic views of platforms and data. First, we question the degree to which digital methods can inform social investigations of collective events, issues or causes. Second, we advance a digital methods paradigm that addresses platforms as socio-cultural artifacts rather than hybrid assemblages. Finally, by reflecting on how we accessed, handled, and explored 9,000 Instagram visuals and around 400,000 Facebook comments to understand influences on middle class understandings of food consumption in Brazil and South Africa, we illustrate a way to design culturally sensitive digital methods research built on ‘quanti-quali’ practices.

KEYWORDS:

• Research methodology
• social media
• digital methods
• platform studies

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Prof. Alex Hughes for her kind and thoughtful leadership of SCArFEthics and Prof. Dorothea Klein for her comments and support on the work discussed in this article. They would also like to thank Prof. Rita Afonso and Dr Luiza Sarayed-Din for providing invaluable insight into Brazilian food and online cultures. Finally, they are extremely grateful to Geetika Anand, Cristine Carvalho, Dr Kim Coetzee, Dr Shari Daya, Dr Megan Lukas, Dr Luiza Sarayed-Din and Rebecca Whitehead for conducting the interviews that provided the very seeds for this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 These restrictions clearly affected Facebook (Rieder, 2015), Instagram (Allen, 2016) and Twitter (Walker et al., 2019) data access.

2 Middle classes are here understood as middle income populations.The project drew upon an understanding of ‘middle class’ as an identity performatively produced through consumption habits and practices (Kravets & Sandikci, 2014).

3 The overall project focused on Brazil, China, and South Africa. These countries were chosen because of their differing institutional contexts and similar rise in middle income populations over the past 20 years (Kochhar, 2015). Our work package only focused on Brazil and South Africa primarily because of the challenges in accessing data from Chinese social media platforms.

4 As a matter of fact, most social media data are not geolocation-annotated. While data science studies have been developing inference techniques to address this, results are still limited (Jurgens et al., 2015).

5 For the second snapshot we switched to reaction metrics as at that point the Web Data Research Assistant no longer provided comment metrics.

6 Given that our Instagram snapshots had visuals as analytical entry points, in the case of Instagram data, the three steps listed above required a social semiotic approach (e.g., Rose, 2016, pp. 106–146). In practice, rather than focusing on prominent terms, we drew our attention to prominent elements – or ‘signifiers’ – in the visuals (e.g., modes to picturing food, presence of humans and non-humans in the pictures).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Economic and Social Research Council [grant number: ES/R005303/1].

Notes on contributors

Stefania Vicari

Stefania Vicari is Senior Lecturer in Digital Sociology at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on participatory cultures, digital advocacy and digital methods.

Daniel Kirby

Daniel Kirby holds an MA in Digital Media and Society from the University of Sheffield where he was awarded the ‘MA Digital Media and Society prize in Sociological Studies’.