Hosted by the DSI Computational Social Science Working Group and Columbia Alliance

Speaker

Philipp Brandt, Assistant Professor, Centre for the Sociology of Organisations (CSO), Sciences Po Paris

Event Details

Thursday, September 25, 2025 (12:00 PM – 1:30 PM ET)

Location: Northwest Corner Building – Armen Avanessians Conference Room – 14th Floor (DSI Suite) – 550 W 120th St, New York, NY 10027

REGISTRATION DEADLINE: The Columbia Morningside campus is open to the Columbia community. If you do not have an active CUID, the deadline to register is at 12:00 PM the day before the event.

Register

Talk Information

From Data Science to Computational Ethnography: Insights from Hackers and Cabbies in New York City

Abstract: Quantitative expertise entails systematic reasoning around formalized records to solve problems in fields as diverse as medicine, manufacturing, and media. Its recent shakeup around the rise of “data science” was an unusually visible episode in a long history of disputes among quantitative experts. Counterintuitively, this technical shift grew out of qualitative reflections among its protagonists. In this talk, I discuss the abductive logic of inference that drove this collective process and propose an extension to quantitative research itself. I turn to New York City’s Yellow Cab industry for an illustration that reveals the relational foundations of a seemingly formal labor market. This abductive logic of inquiry offers computational social scientists a way to move beyond measuring known sources of inequality to detecting new ones as they emerge.