Angela K. VandenBroek - Böcker

Kits for Digital Methods: Doing Sociotechnical Research is a guide to innovating research methods for a world where digital technologies permeate everyday life and research. Drawing on the expertise of leading sociotechnical researchers, it reimagines the “kit” not as a fixed set of tools or solutions, but as a flexible, transparent, and collaborative framework for methodological experimentation. These kits are sandboxes for experimenting, playing, and reflecting on the ethics and possibilities of digital research.Organized into three sections—Digital Engagement, Digital Elicitation, and Digital Data—contributors share their processes for designing and adapting methods to complex digital contexts. Each chapter contains background, components, practical guidance, and lessons learned for exploring the frictions, failures, and surprises that shape sociotechnical research.Kits range from remote fieldwork and social media ethnography to participatory analysis, collaborative image description, and AI-assisted elicitation—filled with concrete techniques for engaging digital environments, eliciting novel forms of data, and working with digital materials. The book encourages adaptation, remixing, and the creation of new kits, fostering a culture of openness and methodological innovation. Written for researchers, educators, and students across the social sciences and humanities, it demystifies advanced digital methods while encouraging critical thinking, ethical reflexivity, and creative problem-solving.

Kits for Digital Methods: Doing Sociotechnical Research is a guide to innovating research methods for a world where digital technologies permeate everyday life and research. Drawing on the expertise of leading sociotechnical researchers, it reimagines the “kit” not as a fixed set of tools or solutions, but as a flexible, transparent, and collaborative framework for methodological experimentation. These kits are sandboxes for experimenting, playing, and reflecting on the ethics and possibilities of digital research.Organized into three sections—Digital Engagement, Digital Elicitation, and Digital Data—contributors share their processes for designing and adapting methods to complex digital contexts. Each chapter contains background, components, practical guidance, and lessons learned for exploring the frictions, failures, and surprises that shape sociotechnical research.Kits range from remote fieldwork and social media ethnography to participatory analysis, collaborative image description, and AI-assisted elicitation—filled with concrete techniques for engaging digital environments, eliciting novel forms of data, and working with digital materials. The book encourages adaptation, remixing, and the creation of new kits, fostering a culture of openness and methodological innovation. Written for researchers, educators, and students across the social sciences and humanities, it demystifies advanced digital methods while encouraging critical thinking, ethical reflexivity, and creative problem-solving.

Anthropology and AI explores the complex intersection of artificial intelligence and human society through a diverse collection of anthropological and social scientific perspectives.Artificial intelligence is rapidly accelerating and permeating the everyday lives of people around the world in ways that are full of promise, perils, and potentials. How does anthropology respond to this? This timely volume brings together twelve carefully curated chapters examining AI’s many manifestations—from machine listening and engineers’ philosophies to large language models and conversational agents. Curated with a broad humanistic and social scientific audience in mind but firmly rooted within broader anthropological and STS conversations about humanity and technology, the contributions are situated on a broad spectrum of approaches to artificial intelligence, spanning theoretical, empirical, and applied social scientific research.Anthropology and AI will appeal to students and researchers across anthropology, science and technology studies, digital humanities, and computer science who are interested in critical perspectives on emerging technologies.