Anthropology and Big Data:
Potentials and Pitfalls

Date:   October 19 (Fri),  2018

Time:   10:00~12:00

Location:  Osaka University Graduate School of Human Sciences
                 North Building, 2F Learning Commons

Instructor:  Morten Axel Pedersen
                 ( Professor of Anthropology , University of Copenhagen )

Based on my involvement in the interdisciplinary Copenhagen Centre for Social Data Science (SODAS) which is hosted at the Faculty of Social Sciences at UCPH, in this talk I discuss how anthropology might contribute to or even transform ”big data” research, and vice versa. Founded by a group of mid-career sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, psychologists and computer scientists, SODAS has over recent years experimented with bringing together otherwise disparate social science data-formats and methods, ranging from sensor logged on and meta-data scraped from digital devises, to ethnographic fieldwork materials and other qualitative data. Departing from examples from a number of such ”quali-quantitative” projects and experiments, particular emphasis will be put on the many potentials and pitfalls – epistemological, ethical and political – arising from mixing computational ”big data” with ethnographic “thick data”.