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E-book What People Leave Behind : Marks, Traces, Footprints and their Relevance to Knowledge Society

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Penilaian

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Sure, paleontologist and historians can make a virtue out of necessity (see, e.g.,Muir,1991; Zemon Davis,2010:5–6; Peltonen,2012; Bassi,2016), but the com-monsensical assumption is that immediate observation and interrogation of phenom-ena in their entirety are preferable—time travel would be more effective.1However,the recourse to traces is getting more frequent not only for studying the human past,which we are forced to access through the small and dilapidated gate of its remnants,but also for making sense of our contemporaneity, which could be observedfirst-hand and freely questioned.2The list of disciplines varies, also in terms of thespecific meaning attributed to traces, and includes, unsurprisingly, semiotics (Eco& Sebeok,1983; Galinon-Mélénec,2016; Olteanu et al.,2019) and forensics(Wiltshire,2019; Servida & Casey,2019; Burnier & Massonnet,2020), but alsoanthropology (Napolitano,2015; Dragojlovic & Samuels,2021), philosophy (Heil,1978; MacDonald,1991; Bouton,2020), sociology (Gómez-Barris & Gray,2010;Heiskala,2021), psychology and neuroscience (De Brigard,2014), literary criticism(Orgel,2015), digital humanities (Bardiot,2021), evaluation studies (Brahim &Lotfi, 2020), and urbanism (Johung & Sen,2013).3This stunning variety alsoelevates the risk of conflating traces with other kind of information, and then it isbut a small step to an all-encompassing view that would see traces everywhere: adynamic reminiscent of the so-called“law of the instrument”or“Maslow’s hammer.” After all, the following three questions examined by Tilly actually apply to any formof scientific research:“how does the phenomenon under investigation leave traces?How can analysts elicit or observe those traces? Using those traces, how can analystsreconstruct specified elements, causes, or effects of the phenomenon?”(Tilly,2002 :252). Indeed, there is hardly any evidence which has not been considered, at one timeor another, as the trace of something else one would like to explain.41 Toward a Sociology of Traces3The last sentence is distinctively Lazarsfeldian, pinpointing a problem, however,characteristic of any empirical science: how to establish a connection between aseries of observations and a more fundamental state of affairs/property (the actualmain focus of interest) that has given rise to those indicators (see Lazarsfeld,1958;see also Swedberg,2018)—“and this is also what men have tried to do over thecenturies when they have asked their sweethearts:‘Do youreallylove me?’”(Lazarsfeld,1953: 352). Although his terminology often evokes parallels with traces(he talks indifferently of“indicators,”“symptoms,”“clues,”and“signs”), Lazarsfeldstoutly championed a statistical“model of convergence”(see Fasanella,2022): thehigher number of data sets which go in the same direction and the greater thecorrespondence among those data, the more confidently scholars can consider theirinterpretations reliable and trustworthy. Traces, though, suggest a different orienta-tion toward data (and their relation to the underlying“quality”they can be tracedback to).

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

301 AGO w

Penerbit

Switzerland : Springer Nature., 2022

Deskripsi Fisik

356 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783031117565

Klasifikasi

301

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Sociology and Anthropology, Society

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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