An overview of three trends which are reshaping the research landscape: big data, open research and post-truth

1. Navigating
Research
Revolutions
Dr. Mark Carrigan
www.markcarrigan.net

2. Three research revolutions:
1.The ‘big data’ revolution
(measuring)
2.Open science and open access
(documenting)
3.The post-truth challenge to
expertise (speaking)
What does this mean for research
practice?

3. + 4.5 billion Google searches estimated
today
+ 478 million tweets estimated today
+ 20.72 billion card transactions in the UK (?)
+ 1.7 billion Uber rides per quarter (pre-
Covid)
+ These are all examples of ‘big data’
+ Large datasets which trouble existing techniques
and infrastructure
+ Produced through use of digital systems:
transactional data
+ A data deluge, a data avalanche and data flood

5. + Autonomous vehicles, smart devices,
ubiquitous video, wearable computing & 5G
+ By 2025, an estimated 463 exabytes of data
will be created daily. Equivalent to
212,765,957 DVDs per day (WEF)
+ Volume, velocity and variety
+ ‘Big Data’ as buzzword going out of fashion.
Replaced by data science & comp soc sci
+ Implied contrast to ’small data’ e.g.
ethnographies, interviews, focus groups and
even surveys. Unlike these it’s not reliant
on:
+ a researcher intervening the world
+ sampling methods to infer to a population
+ data structures which traditional social
science methods often depend on

6. Questions?
• Does this mean an end to interpretation? An end to theory?
• “Who we are when we think no one’s looking” (Rudder)
• “Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even
without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic
explanation at all” (Anderson)
• There’s been a retreat from this over time e.g. combining ‘big data’
and ‘small data’, computational social science, digital social science
• Where is the transactional data in education? What is it
currently used for and what might it be used for in future? How
might education be changed by the desire for more
transactional data?

7. Open Access
+ Publishing dominated by big four: Elsevier, T&F,
Springer, Wiley
+ Huge profit margins: Elsevier’s 35-40% comparable to
Apple products or luxury goods firms
+ Highly subsidized through (a) academic labour (b)
library subscriptions yet paywalls are ubiquitous
+ Gold open access: freely accessible from moment of
publication, often with author-processing charges
+ Green open access: publishes article then self-archives,
often with embargo period
+ Black open access: free sharing of paywalled literature
through social media and hub sites

8. Social Media for Academics
+ From peripheral to mainstream within a decade
+ Academic blogs, Twitter feeds, podcasts,
videocasts, newsletters
+ Shorter, better, faster, free (Dunleavy)
+ Being an open-source academic (Little)
+ Complete normalization with COVID-19
+ Useful for academic networking, raising profile of
publications and identifying
news/events/developments
+ Encouraged by universities as a way of increasing
public engagement. Getting research ‘out there’ to
people who will use it

9. The limitations of
‘openness’
+ Is it enough to simply remove barriers to access?
+ Are academics really using social media to engage with wider publics?
+ Can sharing research before peer review have unintended consequences?
+ Should academics be spending their time chasing retweets?
+ Can universities protect academics against online harassment?
+ Has social media improved relationships between academics and
practitioners or made them worse?

10. Fifteen
minute
break

11. Are we living in a ‘post-truth’ age?
+ Advisor Kellyanne Conway defended Whitehouse Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false
claims about attendance at Trump’s inauguration by describing them as ‘alternative
facts’.
+ "One of the biggest challenges that we have to our democracy is the degree to which
we do not share a common baseline of facts” – Barack Obama
+ Post Truth: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less
influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (OED
2016)
+ The role of social media: filter bubbles, fake news and computational propaganda
+ The role of populism: political leaders from outside the mainstream not bound by
political norms
+ The role of culture: decline of media gatekeepers, influence of philosophical relativism
+ The role of doubt merchants: producing questionable research for commercial reasons

12. + Respect for ‘facts’ depends upon trust
in the experts who produce them: a
belief in their impartiality and reliability
+ How do you know? They would say
that wouldn’t they? Show me the
evidence?
+ Was Michael Gove right that “people in
this country have had enough of
experts”? It’s complex
+ Subcultures are thriving which many
find worrying: the flat earth movement,
QAnon, anti-5G
+ Social media facilitates them but
hostility to expertise is a key driver
+ Often though with a focus on ‘doing
your own research’

13. What does this
mean for you?
+ Breakout rooms for 20 minutes, pick 1 of
these, talk about it and come back for a
closing discussion