Afternoon Miscellany: Latour, Podcasts, and Big Data

3 01 2013

This post would be much more interesting if it concerned the nexus of its three subjects. Sadly, it does not.

  1. I’m working on a forum piece with Vincent Pouliot on Actor-Network Theory (ANT) — one written from the explicit perspective of outsiders. We’ve been puzzled by the apparent lack of theorization of “the body” in Latour. For example, if social relations must be ‘fixed’ by physical objects, why isn’t the human body one such object? If any of our readers are able to weigh in, I’d appreciate it.
  2. I’ve been considering discontinuing the m4a versions of the Duck of Minerva podcast. They take much more time to produce than the mp3 versions; most people seem to listen to the mp3 versions anyway. Is there a constituency in favor of retaining the m4a variants, i.e., the ones with chapter markers and static images?
  3. Henry Farrell tweeted a paper by Gary King on setting up quantitative social-science centers. Henry highlights the section on the end of the quantitative-qualitative divide. I’m sympathetic to it: I certainly feel the pull of teaming with computational-savvy colleagues to do interesting things with “big data,” and I find myself often thinking about how it would be neat to use particular data for uncovering interesting relationships. But it also strikes me as a bit cavalier about the importance of questions — and forms of empirical analysis — that don’t fit cleanly within that rubric. Nonetheless, right on the direction that sociological and economic forces are driving social-scientific research.

For those of you intrigued by the title: how about doing a research project on quantitative social-science centers using ANT and reporting your findings via an m4a audio recording with Latour-esque pictures?