Scope
This workshop looks—practically and critically—at how digital technologies are reshaping the everyday craft of social research. From the first sketches of a question to sampling, fieldwork, analysis, visualization, reproducibility, and ethics, we ask: how can technology help us see people’s lives more clearly without flattening their experiences? We put qualitative innovation (digital/virtual ethnography, CAQDAS, AI-assisted coding, trace and platform ethnography) in genuine conversation with quantitative advances (API-driven datasets, large-scale surveys, text and network analytics, geospatial and mobility analysis, and cautious causal inference with observational data). Our goal is to build bridges—pairing interpretive depth with credible generalization—while modeling transparent, ethical practices when working with platform, sensor, administrative, and community-generated data. We especially welcome submissions grounded in real social problems across migration, health, diet and nutrition, education, labor, and urban life. Formats include technical papers, methods note, demos, datasets, and practitioner case studies that prioritize rigor, openness (shared code/data where feasible), and social relevance.
List of topics of interest
Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):
• Health, care, and well-being: clinic and community realities; ethics of sensitive data
• Food practices, dietary transitions, and nutritional inequalities (household to city scale)
• Labor, precarity, and platform work from the ground up
• Urban margins, housing, and everyday survival; qualitative GIS and neighborhood tracing
• Digital public and platform cultures; trace ethnography and data justice
• Participatory, decolonial, and community-based approaches; consent as an ongoing process
• Sensory, visual, and multimodal ethnography (text–image–audio–video diaries)
• Mixed-methods in practice: small-N depth meeting “big” traces (logs, posts, sensors)
• CAQDAS and AI-assisted coding as assistants (not oracles): transparency, auditability
• Ethical collection of web/platform data (APIs, ToS-compliant pipelines) and privacy-by-design
• Reproducible workflows for qualitative and mixed methods (notebooks, versioning, data docs)
• Storytelling, visualization, and narrative reporting that policymakers and communities can use
Organizing Committee
· Pascual García-Macías, Universidad Tecnica Particular de Loja, Ecuador,
· Christian Starlight Franco-Trejo, Universidad Autonoma de Zacatecas, Mexico,
· Nayeli Burño, Universidad Autonoma de Sinaloa, Mexico,
Program Committee (TBC)
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