Professor Christine Hine

Voluntary roles undertaken wholly or partly through digital technologies have become commonplace and yet there are still significant gaps in our understanding of what makes this kind of work meaningful as a sustained form of volunteer effort. Interview accounts from 15 people describing themselves as digital or social media volunteers are analysed, exploring how they make sense of their role. Relational and temporal aspects of the experience are explored. Relations with the organization are important in providing meaningfulness through the recognition of volunteer efforts. Digital volunteering is understood temporally as meaningful in relation both to the volunteer’s long-term life goals and immediate circumstances. The flexibility of digital volunteering in the context of other time demands is particularly valued. Digital volunteers value autonomy, dignity and recognition, but autonomy and recognition can be in tension where temporal and spatial flexibility of working results in lack of visibility to others in the organization.

Whilst chatbots for mental health are becoming increasingly prevalent, research on user experiences and expectations is relatively scarce and also equivocal on their acceptability and utility. This paper asks how people formulate their understandings of what might be appropriate in this space. We draw on data from a group of non-users who have experienced a need for support, and so can imagine self as therapeutic target – enabling us to tap into their imaginative speculations of the self in relation to the chatbot other and the forms of agency they see as being at play; unconstrained by a specific actual chatbot.   Analysis points towards ambiguity over some key issues: whether the apps were seen as having a role in specific episodes of mental health or in relation to an ongoing project of supporting wellbeing; whether the chatbot could be viewed as having a therapeutic agency or was a mere tool; and how far these issues related to matters of the user’s personal qualities or the specific nature of the mental health condition. Chatbots were situated as both a specific and generic technology; leading to a range of  traditions, norms and practices being used to construct expectations and understandings.

This article explores how the work of ethical assurance is understood by those involved in artificial intelligence development and deployment, and uses the findings to consider how ethical reflection might be better supported. The article presents a case study of a multi-disciplinary project developing a care support system that used machine learning in remote monitoring of people living at home with dementia. In this project engineering and clinical perspectives come together through a fractionated interdisciplinary trading zone to address goals such as remote detection of urinary infections. Ethics is done, according to project participants, in formal ethical review processes and through a shared understanding of common goals, but also in discipline-specific practices that sit outside of the trading zone. A key role is played by team members who translate concerns between discipline-based research groups and who act as proxies for the ultimate users of the systems not directly present within the trading zone. These insights into cross-disciplinary ethical work in relation to smart care lead us to recommend that infrastructural support for imaginative and transparent ethical reflection needs to be woven through the collaborations that create artificial intelligence, both across disciplines and throughout the lifetime of a project.

In-home sensor systems supported by machine learning are increasingly used to enhance communication between those living with long-term conditions such as dementia and healthcare professionals and carers who support them. Perspectives from the sociology of infrastructures are used to explore the development and deployment of such a system of smart care, drawing on interviews with researchers and developers, healthcare professionals and service users, and carers. The analysis finds that labor of various forms is required to manage the production of useful sensor data, including parsing the reasons for missing data and organizing appropriate actions in response. The analysis highlights active processes of deriving meaning from that data in ways that participants find useful, ethical, and sustainable. The conclusion emphasizes the usefulness of an infrastructural approach in order to recognize the heterogeneous forms of labor involved in developing ethically sensitive, person-centered forms of remote-monitoring-enabled care.

Background: Artificial intelligence (AI) is said to be “transforming mental health”. AI-based technologies and technique are now considered to have uses in almost every domain of mental health care: including decision-making, assessment and healthcare management. What remains underexplored is whether/how mental health recovery is situated within these discussions and practices. Method: Taking conversational agents as our point of departure, we explore the ways official online materials explain and make sense of chatbots, their imagined functionality and value for (potential) users. We focus on three chatbots for mental health: Woebot, Wysa and Tess. Findings: “Recovery” is largely missing as an overt focus across materials. However, analysis does reveal themes that speak to the struggles over practice, expertise and evidence that the concept of recovery articulates. We discuss these under the headings “troubled clinical responsibility”, “extended virtue of (technological) self-care” and “altered ontologies and psychopathologies of time”. Conclusions: Ultimately, we argue that alongside more traditional forms of recovery, chatbots may be shaped by, and shaping, an increasingly individualised form of a “personal recovery imperative”.

Many local online platforms for people to give away or sell items have arisen in recent years. While some research has analysed modes of consumption emerging in such sites, there has been little exploration of the nature of the contact between local residents that these sites occasion and their implications for local sense of community. This paper analyses interviews with users of local online platforms for giving and selling items within one town in south-east England, identifying judgments that users make about one another and exploring the connections that are made between online and offline. Imagining other users and projecting social norms onto them emerges as important in making transactions meaningful. Users also often imagine social difference and make judgments that reproduce socio-economic stereotypes. Usage is portrayed as a positive experience enhancing users’ views of local community in a general sense, but shows limited tendencies to overcome existing social divisions.

This paper focuses on the way in which people deploy scientific knowledge alongside other resources in everyday interactions. In the UK headlice are common amongst schoolchildren, and treatment is viewed as a parental responsibility. Choice between treatment options lies with individual parents, with official guidance giving no clear steer. In the face of this combination of responsibility and uncertainty, users of an online parenting forum justify their actions using a variety of resources, including claims to scientific knowledge of both headlice and the action of various treatments, but also drawing on the authority of having direct experience, trust in brand-named products and generalised suspicion of “chemical” treatments. These discussions occasion expression of knowledge as part of portraying oneself as a responsible parent, and thus while they do not necessarily represent public knowledge about science more generally, they do offer a useful site to explore what people do with science.

A wide array of consumer devices that purport to measure sleep are now available, with sleep measurement often an additional feature alongside the measurement of daily activity through steps and monitoring of heart rate. These devices offer their users insight into the duration of sleep and different sleep phases and the ability to share the outcomes in the form of numbers, charts, and graphs. This paper explores the ways in which these technologies are deployed within everyday online interactions. We explore depictions of sleep self-tracking that are commonly available online and analyse how the sleep data collected are interpreted by users and deployed in differing social interactions through a comparison of traces of the Fitbit sleep self-tracker across Twitter, Instagram, and the parenting discussion forum Mumsnet. We find that sleep self-tracking is, across platforms, occasioning new practices of evidencing sleep that acquire particular meaning within existing relationships. There is also however a strong mood of rejection, mistrust, and doubt around self-tracked sleep. The new ways of evidencing sleep sit alongside and in dialogue with previous ways of knowing sleep and of deploying it within social interactions, rather than displacing them.

The new social contexts formed via the Internet, and the new forms of data made available by the increasing use of diverse forms of computer mediated communication, have challenged researchers to develop approaches which do them justice. At the same time, there has been concern that established principles should be preserved, and that the connection between virtual research methods and more conventional research approaches should not be rejected out of hand. Despite a number of handbooks and textbooks published in recent years there is still a dearth of authoritative works which offer comprehensive coverage of the virtual research methods available to social researchers. In particular, there is none which thoroughly explores the full range of virtual research methods and their antecedents, and which explores the methodological and epistemological ramifications of their development. This multivolume reference collection fills this gap. The collection covers perspectives on the Internet as a social space; research models for the Internet and the skills, techniques and approaches needed to conduct research in a virtual environment; innovations in the research process and reflections on these innovations; and the ethical considerations to take into account when doing research on the Internet.

The internet has become embedded into our daily lives, no longer an esoteric phenomenon, but instead an unremarkable way of carrying out our interactions with one another. Online and offline are interwoven in everyday experience. Using the internet has become accepted as a way of being present in the world, rather than a means of accessing some discrete virtual domain. Ethnographers of these contemporary Internet-infused societies consequently find themselves facing serious methodological dilemmas: where should they go, what should they do there and how can they acquire robust knowledge about what people do in, through and with the internet?This book presents an overview of the challenges faced by ethnographers who wish to understand activities that involve the internet. Suitable for both new and experienced ethnographers, it explores both methodological principles and practical strategies for coming to terms with the definition of field sites, the connections between online and offline and the changing nature of embodied experience. Examples are drawn from a wide range of settings, including ethnographies of scientific institutions, television, social media and locally based gift-giving networks. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/ethnography-for-the-internet-9780857855701/#sthash.6wmdZKzF.dpuf

This chapter explores the varied ways in which qualitative and quantitative, large-scale and small-scale research designs have been combined in the study of the Internet. The chapter also considers multimodal and online/offline studies, which explore a research object by combining diverse forms of data drawn by crossing the offline/online boundary or combining digital and analogue data. The focus of the chapter is on exploring the motivations for these combinations and outlining the distinctive issues that heterogeneous research designs in these domains encounter. Internet research has occasioned many innovative research designs, as the sheer quantity of data available online often prompts even those overtly committed to a qualitative paradigm to explore techniques for visualizing data, and exploring patterns on a larger scale through social network analysis or sentiment analysis. The spatial complexities entailed in networked communication often, however, introduce a challenge for researchers seeking to combine perspectives.

Whilst digital technologies are often popularly portrayed as inherently different from their material counterparts, recent research has accentuated continuities between the two. Research on the material aspects of digital technologies has emphasised that both material and digital technologies are embedded in practice and acquire their meaning in context. This is particularly so in science, where research in science and technology studies has illuminated the contextual interpretation of representations and their contingent manifestation through embedding in specific sociotechnical configurations. The current paper explores how digital technologies are experienced in a specific field of science, biological systematics. Email accounts were solicited from biologists who have been working with digital images of the biological specimens conventionally used in work on the classification and naming of organisms. Thematic analysis of the interviews shows that qualities of digital images were highly contextual, often defined in dialogue with their material counterparts which are also defined in fluid and contextual fashion. Discussing the use of digital specimen images involved distinctions between different forms of work and different organisms being studied and referenced the varied institutional and geographic positioning of respondents. The introduction of digital images offered the possibility of new sociotechnical configurations emerging and to some extent realised the aspirations of digitization projects to enable new forms of distributed working. This was, however, a qualified success restricted to only some aspects of the systematists’ work.

Social science research requires methods that are responsive to and congruent with contemporary social formations. Digital technologies present a challenge to which social researchers must rise, and in turn offer the chance to access, generate and analyse new information in new ways and address new research questions. In response to this challenge, this interdisciplinary collection considers the quantitative and qualitative analysis of social media, addressing the contemporary concern with 'big data' but also the rich or 'thick data' available. It provides examples of research that has sought to explore digital methods through comparing and combining these with 'offline' or traditional approaches, and presents case studies that are both innovative in their use of new, existing and combined methods but also question the nature of innovation. It also develops some of the key challenges in mainstreaming digital methods, including debates in educational research, research with young people, and the ethical issues that digital and social researchers face.

The United Kingdom Government are planning to issue guidance on sleep duration. Whilst sleep is clearly important for health, offering such guidance is not the answer. Within this commentary we put forward three arguments to support this claim: (i) sleep is liminal and beyond the limits of voluntary agency; (ii) sleep is linked to structural inequality; and (iii) sleep is multiple. The first two points are now well established. However, the third encourages a considerable break from established thinking. Recent research has highlighted that we need to move away from viewing sleep as a singular, objectively defined phenomenon, and instead position it as many different practices woven together. Sleep is situated, contingent and is enacted in multiple ways. Public health would be better served by a ground-up approach which explores good and poor sleep across these three axes: liminality, social position and ontology.

As use of the Internet has become increasingly widespread, the Internet has also become a natural site for qualitative research. New researchable populations emerge, and illuminating discussions on every conceivable topic have become accessible to researchers. The Internet also presents many challenges, however, raising the questions of how to develop ethical and achievable research projects, and how to present findings to the widest possible audience. This book focuses on the process of writing qualitative Internet research, from the construction of the initial proposal to the preparation of different types of research reports, including conventional dissertations and more innovative media forms. Covering ethnographic, interview-based, and documentary analysis, The Internet offers clear guidance on the challenges and opportunities posed by the application of these approaches to Internet settings, drawing on a wide array of published examples and rooting its advice in the established principles of qualitative research. The author emphasizes the importance of reflexivity and developing awareness of the various genres of qualitative writing, together with building research reports that are significant as mainstream social research. Although the emphasis of this book is on qualitative research, it also draws on quantitative research techniques, since the sheer wealth of data available on the Internet prompts consideration of new ways of visualizing and summarizing data. The Internet also explores initiatives by Internet researchers to make use of new media technologies for analyzing and presenting their research, and to allow for new forms of interaction with research participants and audiences.

Smart technologies in the home promise efficiency and control, but this simplistic story obscures their potential to reconfigure relationships and introduce new tensions into domestic contexts. This paper explores ethnography as a method to facilitate sociological analysis of the smart technologies in the home and develop a grounded understanding of their role in lived experience. The paper assembles insights from ethnography of silence, ethnography of infrastructure, and autoethnography. While much sociological commentary stresses the dataveillance capacities of such technologies, for ethnographers it is important to remember that our role is to do justice to members’ understandings whether they relate to dataveillance or not. Ethnographers need to address the common tendency for facilitating technologies of this kind to become unspoken aspects of everyday life Autoethnography offers a route into exploring the nuanced meaning of the silences that the use of smart technologies entails and engaging with emotional dimensions of their use.

This article aims to expand on the currently popular practice of conducting ethnographic studies of individual online fan groups to find other ways of using the internet ethnographically for television studies. The example of the Antiques Roadshow is used to explore a strategy for ethnographic attention to the diversity of mundane engagements with a particular television text via the internet. The development of this strategy draws on recent thinking on the constitution of ethnographic field sites, focusing on conceptualization of the field as a made object, and development of multi-sited approaches as appropriate forms of engagement with contemporary culture. This strategy also builds on recent debates about the significance of ‘found’ digital data for social research. Potential problems with this approach include loss of depth and contextualizing information, and the risk of only focusing on that data which is easily found by dominant search engines. These problems can be offset to some extent by increased focus on reflexivity, and by allowing the field site to spill out beyond the internet as the ethnographer finds it necessary and useful in order to explore particular practices of meaning-making.

The use of information and communication technology in scientific research has been hailed as the means to a new larger-scale, more efficient, and cost-effective science. But although scientists increasingly use computers in their work and institutions have made massive investments in technology, we still have little idea how computing affects the way scientists work and the kind of knowledge they produce. In Systematics as Cyberscience, Christine Hine explores these questions by examining the developing use of information and communication technology in one discipline, systematics (which focuses on the classification and naming of organisms and exploration of evolutionary relationships). Her sociological study of the ways that biologists working in this field have engaged with new technology is an account of how one of the oldest branches of science transformed itself into one of the newest and became a cyberscience. Combining an ethnographic approach with historical review and textual analysis, Hine investigates the emergence of a virtual culture in systematics and how that new culture is entwined with the field's existing practices and priorities. Hine examines the policy perspective on technological change, the material culture of systematics (and how the virtual culture aligns with it), communication practices with new technology, and the complex dynamics of change and continuity on the institutional level. New technologies have stimulated reflection on the future of systematics and prompted calls for radical transformation, but the outcomes are thoroughly rooted in the heritage of the discipline. Hine argues that to understand the impact of information and communication technology in science we need to take account of the many complex and conflicting pressures that contemporary scientists navigate. The results of technological developments are rarely unambiguous gains in efficiency, and are highly discipline-specific.

There are enduring inequalities in usage of social media, relating both to the demographic patterning of users and to differences in the kinds of use people make of these platforms. This paper presents a content analysis of representations of Twitter in three British newspapers from 2007 to 2014 aimed at exploring the potential contribution that differing journalistic practices make to sustaining the inequalities in uptake and use of social media platforms. The newspapers were selected for the contrasting composition of their readership, allowing for comparison of the portrayals of Twitter to distinct socio-demographic groups. The portrayal of Twitter was found to differ between the three newspapers analysed, with the readers of the tabloid and mid-range newspaper being presented a depiction of Twitter as a site for elite and celebrity voices and for fandom rather than a site for their own active participation or political content creation, to a greater extent than the readers of the quality paper. These results suggest that the journalistic practices distinctive to these diverse newspapers may have significant implications for the extent to which their readership are encouraged to see themselves as able to have a voice on social media: the tabloid style risks depoliticising Twitter.

It has now become a realistic prospect for smart care to be provided at home for those living with long-term conditions such as dementia. In the contemporary smart care scenario, homes are fitted with an array of sensors for remote monitoring providing data that feed into intelligent systems developed to highlight concerning patterns of behaviour or physiological measurements and to alert healthcare professionals to the need for action. This paper explores some ethical issues that may arise within such smart care systems, focusing on the extent to which ethical issues can be addressed at the system design stage. Artificial intelligence has been widely portrayed as an ethically risky technology, posing challenges for privacy and human autonomy and with the potential to introduce and exacerbate bias and inequality. While broad principles for ethical artificial intelligence have become established, the mechanisms for governing ethical artificial intelligence are still evolving. In healthcare settings the implementation of smart technologies falls within the existing frameworks for ethical review and governance. Feeding into this ethical review there are many practical steps that designers can take to build ethical considerations into the technology. After exploring the pre-emptive steps that can be taken in design and governance to provide for an ethical smart care system, the paper reviews the potential for further ethical challenges to arise within the everyday implementation of smart care systems in the context of dementia, despite the best efforts of all concerned to pre-empt them. The paper concludes with an exploration of the dilemmas that may thus face healthcare professionals involved in implementing this kind of smart care and with a call for further research to explore ethical dimensions of smart care both in terms of general principles and lived experience.

Digital work has become increasingly common, taking a wide variety of forms including working from home, mobile work, gig work, crowdsourcing, and online volunteering. It is organizationally, interpretively, spatially, and temporally complex. An array of innovative methodologies have begun to emerge to capture this complexity, whether through re-purposing existing tools, devising entirely novel methods, or mixing old and new. This volume brings together some ofthese techniques in an accessible sourcebook for management, business, organizational, and work researchers. It presents a range of innovative methods which capture and analyse digitally-related work practices through reflexive accounts of real-world research projects, and elucidates the range of challenges such methods may raise for research practice. It outlines debates and recommendations, and provides further reading and information to support research practice. The book is organised in four sections that reflect different areas of focus and methodological approaches: working with screens;digital working practices; distributed work and organizing; and digital traces of work. It then concludes by reflecting on the methodological issues, research ethics, requisite skills, and future of research given the intensification of digital work during a global pandemic that has impacted all aspectsof our lives.

Citizen science promises to include a wide constituency of participants in the knowledge production process, allowing lay people to make contributions based on their own expertise. In practice, however, the design of an infrastructure for citizen science may exert a filter on what counts as knowledge and impose standards for judging the quality and authenticity of contributions. This chapter explores the contrasts between top-down and bottom-up approaches in order to highlight some of the forms of exclusion that can occur in a knowledge infrastructure for citizen science, and to explore alternatives for designing infrastructures that more faithfully reflect lay understandings of knowledge.

O artigo apresenta um panorama dos desafios enfrentados por etnógrafos que buscam entender atividades envolvendo a internet explorando tanto princípios metodológicos quanto estratégias práticas chegar a um acordo com a definição de sites de campo, as conexões entre online e offline e a natureza mutável da experiência corporificada. Os exemplos são extraídos de uma ampla gama de configurações, incluindo etnografias de instituições científicas, televisão, mídia social e redes locais de presentes. The article presents an overview of the challenges faced by ethnographers seeking to understand Internet activities by exploring both methodological principles and practical strategies to come to terms with the definition of field sites, the connections between online and offline, and the changing nature of embodied experience. Examples are drawn from a wide range of settings, including ethnographies of scientific institutions, television, social media, and local gift networks.

This chapter focuses on how people in their everyday practice make sense of themselves and the society that they live in using an array of resources that include, but are not confined to, digital media. The advent of digital media has changed the forms of interaction available to us and the extent to which other people’s intimate thoughts and activities are visible to us on an everyday basis. People’s consumption practices, their fitness levels, their musical tastes and response to media events are constantly displayed for us to measure ourselves against. In its focus on everyday processes of self-calibration this paper will explore lived dimensions of datafication and mediatization and seeks to consider how far these processes are indeed offering new resources for understanding who we are, with particular reference to practices of music consumption. The chapter focuses on the Philip Glass opera Akhnaten as a case study, exploring the online resources that have emerged around this work and in particular focusing on the extent to which audience responses to the work become visible online. The chapter explores the extent to which online audiences are telling one another how to interpret the work and considers the potential outcomes in terms of tendencies for audience homogeneity and audience fragmentation. The online landscape of music consumption emerges as a complex array of intertwined resources in which conventional forms of expertise remain very prominent but alternative voices from ordinary audience members are also widely available. These ordinary audience voices take having experienced a production as conferring sufficient authority to comment on its qualities, but also stress the importance of context of listening and having the suitable personal qualities to appreciate the music. Streaming services, search algorithms and YouTube recommendations play a part in informing audience preferences but take their position alongside and entwined with ordinary user voices and privileged professional expertise in providing guidance on how to consume music.