Qualitative Methods for Digital Social Research

Nimmi Rangaswamy is Professor at the Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad, where she brings an anthropological lens to understanding the impacts of AI research and praxis. Formerly, she was Adjunct Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad teaching courses at the intersections of society and technology. In the domain of industry research, she was a senior research scientist and lead the Human Interactions research area at the Xerox Research Center India working in the building of technologies in the areas of consumer-centric health care and urban mobility. Previously, her job at Microsoft Research India was a combination of theoretical analysis and ethnographic field research to understand technology use in developing countries. These are studies to understand patterns of technology adoption in various social contexts and spaces in India, ranging from middle-class consumption of domestic media, the business models of cyber cafés, and the use of mobile internet and Facebook among urban slum youth.

Shriram Venkatraman is an Assistant Professor of Business and Management at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and a Fellow of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, at Odense, Denmark. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi (IIIT-D) and was an Adjunct Faculty at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIM-K). Other than several peer-reviewed journal articles, he is also the author of a monograph titled 'Social Media in South India' (UCL Press) and co-author of a comparative book 'How the World Changed Social Media' (also UCL Press). He has taught several courses on Digital & Economic Anthropology and Digital Research Methods both at IIIT-Delhi and at IIM-Kozhikode. He has co-taught a MOOC course on 'Anthropology of Social Media' on Futurelearn. He has a PhD in Digital Anthropology from University College London, UK. He is also a trained professional statistician and has held leadership positions at Walmart, USA.