I am a social scientist I guess by virtue of three key measures: education, career history and number of unread books on my shelves.
I started with the education. First in my family to go to University, a product of the Blair government’s drive to put every young person through university. ‘We’, meaning people of our class, didn’t go to University. That was what my grandfather said. Well I went anyway, never one to respect hierarchy for hierarchy’s sake and just kept going until there were no more degrees left to get.
So begins career history. After publishing my PhD thesis on Digital Piracy as a book with Palgrave I went on to become a Lecturer specialising in Media & Culture at the University of Essex. My interests depended on my particular hyperfixations of the time, but always revolving around tech culture, the mechanics of media and finding weird ways to do research.
My obsession with media materiality led me to create a mini-museum of dead media in my office, including my prized posession, an Edison Standard Phonograph from 1904, which I still have today as well as multiple peer-reviewed articles on the role of media design in the shaping of communication and power.
My obsession with weird esoteric tech cultures resulted in me studying the far-right and radicalisation, collaborating with Hope Not Hate, mapping out Twitter to find the intersections of weird tech communities and reactionaries, and showing how tech companies present themselves as the answer to human rights.
My obsession with tinkering with new research toys led me to teach myself data science to a standard where I created a degree and multiple undergrad courses on Social Data Science, leading to me teaching hundreds of complete beginners how to code. These skills also led to whole new domains of collaboration working with others on topics such as environmental activism, business violations of human rights and anti-vaccination groups in Italy.
My introductory course on using Python for Social Data Science is available on Github.
The final measure, the number of unread books on my shelves is a reminder that I remain a social scientist even after leaving academia. I didn’t leave academia after 22 years because I was done with social science, I left because I was done with academia. I wanted to do something different and new with social science, to take it somewhere new. So when I left my office, I didn’t leave my books behind, I didn’t chuck my library of journal articles or trash all my notes. I brought them with me to take them somewhere new.