Abstract
New technologies and social media have gained increasing interest in science and mainly in quantitative research. The possibilities to collect large amounts of data have led to a new empiricism which already announced “the end of theory in science” (Anderson, 2008). With the notion ‘Big Data’ we follow the definition of Boyd and Crawford (2012) as “capacity to search, aggregate, and cross-reference large data sets”. Big Data practices can be found nowadays in many different contexts and any kind of limitations or benefits may be different in each context or field.The goal of this conversation session is twofold: 1) to present an overview of existing technologies and demonstrate selected tools to the audience in order to provide them with ideas about how to utilize such technologies for their own research. And 2) to discuss the usefulness of the presented technologies and to identify possible pitfalls.
Keywords
Research Methods; New Technologies; Big Data; Social Media; Science Theory
Citation
Thoring, K., Müller-Rakow, A., and Bohemia, E. (2016) New Technologies - New Design Research?, in Lloyd, P. and Bohemia, E. (eds.), Future Focused Thinking - DRS International Conference 2016, 27 - 30 June, Brighton, United Kingdom. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2016/conversations/3
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New Technologies - New Design Research?
New technologies and social media have gained increasing interest in science and mainly in quantitative research. The possibilities to collect large amounts of data have led to a new empiricism which already announced “the end of theory in science” (Anderson, 2008). With the notion ‘Big Data’ we follow the definition of Boyd and Crawford (2012) as “capacity to search, aggregate, and cross-reference large data sets”. Big Data practices can be found nowadays in many different contexts and any kind of limitations or benefits may be different in each context or field.The goal of this conversation session is twofold: 1) to present an overview of existing technologies and demonstrate selected tools to the audience in order to provide them with ideas about how to utilize such technologies for their own research. And 2) to discuss the usefulness of the presented technologies and to identify possible pitfalls.