Mana motuhake ā-raraunga: datafication and social science research in Aotearoa

Abstract

Social practices, interactions and relations are increasingly being turned into data, driven by technologies that enable new methods of data accumulation, digitisation, integration and manipulation (Taylor and Broeders 2015; Couldry and Yu 2018; Mann and Daly 2019). This ‘datafication’ is not only transforming social relations, it is also reshaping social science through the generation of datasets that open up new avenues for research and methodological development (van Dijck 2014) and generating debate about the relationships between data, digitalisation, ethics and human wellbeing (boyd and Crawford 2012; Mittelstadt and Floridi 2016; O’Neil 2016; Eubanks 2018).