In late May I went to Covilha to present a paper – developed with Tiago Santos Pereira – at the International Conference “Communicating Science: Emerging Publication Models“. The paper aims at exploring to what extent different notions and approaches related to digital technologies that are gaining relevance in the social sciences identify different scholarly communities and to pinpoint the role of “Digital Methods” in the bigger picture. This work represented a preliminary attempt to apply some of the tools we have been experimenting during the Oficinas Digital Methods in late 2014 – we played in particular with Sciencescape, OpenRefine and Gephi. We decided to use the tools in an explorative and inductive fashion. This was a choice not only motivated by our recent engagement with these tools, but also a way to cope with the classical problem of “experimenter regress” (Venturini et al. 2014, p. 16): because of the novelty of these methods, the claims are difficult to ground and both concepts and results appear “unclear”. There is a risk that visual artefacts aesthetically appealing or intuitively convincing self-validate themselves. Finding stable criteria to evaluate the artefacts is particularly difficult for novice of the field. As a way out, Venturini et al. (ibid.) suggests to compare the results of the tools with results obtained in traditional research, hoping to find a consistency among them. We follow this advice: the considerations we propose in the paper are the result of the triangulation between visual network analysis of the scientific fields around digital methods and a more traditional literature review, enriched by our personal experience with leading scholars of the field. Rather than as “evidence”, we used the visual artefacts as “hints” for our investigation, questioning  if and how they resonate with our knowledge of the literature, approaching digital methods as a partner in knowledge co-production.

Here is the prezi presentation from the conference; the article is currently under revision for publication. You can also download a pdf version of the prezi presentation from my Academia.edu page.