Mini-Workshop: Diasporas Lab Day

Part of the Long Program Culture Analytics
May 17 - 18, 2016

Overview

camini_diasporasMigrants or non-migrants, today we all live in a digital world. As we travel, pay, communicate, learn and network on different digital and social platforms, our personal virtual networks keep growing and speak about us through the electronic signatures we leave every time we interface with ITC infrastructures.

The massive amount of data generated by digital tools offers new research opportunities, but it also poses new challenges for the established ‘working’ methods traditionally employed within the humanities and social sciences, such as novel methods, the categorization of the data, and new paradigms and ethical approaches.

How can we best make use of this new ‘raw material’ in our research on human migration? How can methods imported from the quantitative sciences such as statistical processing, graph theory, or mathematical modeling be used to find common ground with those employed within the qualitative social sciences with which they sometimes conflict? Finally, what epistemological concepts can we introduce to accompany the development of digitalization? Can we speak of a digital theory of migration?

As this new generation sociology emerges, it becomes imperative to be able to effectively analyze and interpret the newly available big and small databases and analyze the genesis of categories and categorization issues as new cognitive turning points in migration studies.

The goal of the Diasporas Lab Day workshop is to renew and/or adapt existing research methodologies and to promote the development and diffusion of new ones within the broad field of human migration studies. We will discuss tools for mapping migrant flows and dispersion, modeling cultural integration by data, and providing knowledge about migrant sentiment analysis.  We will also attempt to explore new research fields within immersive sociology.

Please send your questions to: camini@ipam.ucla.edu

Organizing Committee

Dana Diminescu (Telecom ParisTech I3 CNRS)
Maria D'Orsogna (California State University, Northridge (CSU Northridge))
Leon Gurevitch (Victoria University of Wellington)
Roger Waldinger (University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA))