 Greetings from Cambridge, Massachusetts. My name is Christian Sandvig, and I am delighted to welcome you to this panel on behalf of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. This panel is a part of Haystack 2010, and the title is Future Social Science on and with Digital Media. As you may have already noticed, this panel is not like a traditional academic panel. Instead of doing a traditional format, what we've decided to do is assemble a distinguished group of global scholars to each speak for five minutes on YouTube videos. The overall panel will take you about 30 minutes to watch. If you're using YouTube, buttons will appear in the video that let you navigate from one video to the next. Of course, you can look at them in any order that you want or not at all. In this clip, I'll introduce the panelists and say my bit about the future of social science. First, let me say I'm honored to join such a distinguished group in this enterprise. Our first panelist after me is Allison Powell. She's a postdoctoral research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute at Oxford University. She received the PhD in communication studies from Concordia University, Montreal, and she is currently a fellow of Canada's Social Science and Humanities Research Council. She held a previous appointment at Telecom Paris Tech and she'll speak to us about the legal challenges that researchers and, in fact, many users of the internet face. Specifically, she'll comment on the digital economy bill in the UK. Next up, we have Professor Richard Rogers. Richard is a web epistemologist. He holds the chair in new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam. He directs the Digital Methods Initiative and the govcom.org foundation. His last book, Information Politics on the Web, from MIT Press, won Book of the Year Award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. He'll speak to us today about Twitter as a storytelling machine in the context of the Iran election of 2009. Next, I'm pleased to introduce Bodo Balazs. He is a lecturer at the Hungarian University of Technology and Economics. He's also a PhD candidate at Iotvos-Loran University in Budapest. Please forgive my Hungarian pronunciation. He's the past recipient of a Fulbright Award and he's been a visiting researcher at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford. He'll speak to us about file sharing networks as a research problem. Finally, we have Professor David Phillips, an associate professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, well known for his work on surveillance. He was previously a professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas at Austin and he'll speak to us about location-aware technologies, surveillance, and identity. But first, my name again is Christian Sandvig and I am a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I'll say my bit. For the remainder of my time, what I'd like to do is expand on some of the points I made in an earlier essay entitled, Why the Internet is on the Verge of Blowing Up All of Our Methods Courses. Sounds a little overdramatic now that I say it out loud. OK. My take on the future of social science is that our methods courses that create social scientists are basically organized around procedure. You could say that's what research methods are. We use that as a synonym for methods, procedure, a set of steps that everyone follows in order to do social science. My assertion in this talk is that we need to have a more wide-ranging discussion about research design. Our methods education at this moment needs to be able to produce students who are capable of inventing their own procedures with digital media. We'll have some examples of that, I hope, later in the panel as well. One of my favorite books on research methods is a book called Unobtrusive Methods by Webb, Campbell, Schwartz, and Seacrest. First published in 1966. It's sometimes thought of as a social science classic. Now, Webb, at all, make the point that what we call research is done at what they call outcroppings, where the theory matches the instrumentation. So we have questions that we're interested in answering, and then we have instrumentation that allows us to look at things. And there's a small overlap in between the two. You could say that this outcrop, this overlap, is like the small overlap in a Venn diagram in the center there. Now, even though we have a lot of questions, only a little bit of information is susceptible to research at any given time. And even though instrumentation keeps getting better, it keeps improving, we're still kind of looking at the top of an island and guessing about the mountain range that is under the ocean. This is what we're doing when we do things like ask people survey questions about their life. But now, because of digital media, you could say the Venn diagram has exploded, the sea has been drained, all of our metaphors are failing, or at least my metaphors. Thanks to ubiquitous digital media and information technology, we have stores of data that we never dreamed of, and we have entirely new modes of research. My inspiration for this particular Haystack panel, the one that you're watching now, was an editorial in the journal Science called Life in the Network. Now, the editorial makes the case for a new kind of social science to emerge as a result of advances in information and communication technology. Just because computers, at least in the developed world, are surrounding us, and they're often recording all kinds of data inadvertently, or maybe even unintentionally. And this is such a reversal of the way that we normally think about data as social scientists. Now, I'm not sure I agree 100% with the priorities that are given in this article, but overall, it makes some very compelling points. And one of them is that we are at a crossroads. You could say that a new kind of social science, a future social science, is already occurring. And it's occurring, sometimes called computational social science or e-social science. It's occurring in places like, quote, Google, Yahoo, and the National Security Agency. Computational social science, if we're not careful, the editorial says, could easily become the exclusive domain of private companies and government agencies. Now, one way to begin to address this is for us to step up and to train a new generation of researchers to take advantage of the internet and digital media and information technology in ways they never have before. You could say the way we're training them now, though, is full of all kinds of weird assumptions that hearken back to an earlier age of social science. I'll just give you a couple. If you take a methods course now, the kinds of things you'll find in it imply that, for example, social science is slow. Samples are small. Data is scarce. Data is expensive. Field work requires travel. In short, it makes it seem as though the most difficult part of the research is painstakingly gathering the data. Now, research, in this context, you could define as executing the same procedure as everybody else. Now, I don't know what new social science will look like or who will be allowed to do it, but I know that we can step up to this challenge. We can design methods courses that embody a different set of assumptions about data. For example, what would our methods courses look like if they embody these assumptions? For example, social science is fast and responsive. Data is plentiful. Theory is scarce. Methods means designing a new kind of research, not using the procedures handed down to you by someone else. I'll end there because I want to hear from our distinguished panel on these questions. Thank you for your attention. And please have pity, as I've never been a video blogger before.