Dang Nguyen

This chapter introduces a range of natural language processing (NLP) techniques and models that could be mobilised towards the study of digital diasporas. Contextualising the discussion of NLP in the context of social media, the chapter discusses the strengths and weaknesses of NLP techniques and models in the analysis and synthesis of large-scale social media datasets – with a particular focus on what they may mean for researchers of digital diaspora. More attention needs to be paid, and investment made, to the development of NLP methods and libraries for non-English languages to aid researchers with the task of studying large multilingual corpora generated as digital traces left behind by diasporic communities on social media. Using a particular case study from applying NLP to a Vietnamese social media dataset, this chapter discusses how NLP is a method sensitive to detecting diasporic activities, how it could help researchers reconcile with the relational paradigm in network analysis by paying attention to the content of diasporic exchanges, and the pitfalls associated with the process of making NLP ‘work’ on non-English datasets.

This chapter discusses digital ethnography as a methodological approach to studying diasporas. Digital ethnography is an immersive approach to theorising, conceptualising, and practising research in digital and data-rich environments, allowing the researcher to reflexively engage in rapidly transforming human-machine landscapes to include non-human actors in examining social relationships, cultural formations, and information and relation flows across diaspora networks. As a research practice that commits to a non-media-centric view, digital ethnography acknowledges and accounts for the digital as part of our worlds that are both theoretical and practical; it is a framework through which to do ethnography across sites and research questions by foregrounding the digital in generative and cogent ways. The chapter also discusses how the adaptive nature of digital ethnography, which can include hybrid ethnography that combines both online and in-person data, as well as making room for complementary methods can accommodate the complexities of the diasporic situation as an elastic theoretical framework.

The computational turn in the social sciences and humanities has generated much excitement about the potential to refresh our approaches to the study of the techno-social. From natively digital to digitised data, researchers of digital diasporas increasingly find themselves working with a range of disparate digital objects. These digital objects can include anything from hyperlinks to timestamps, from platform behavioural metrics such as react, share, or retweet, to different media formats such as text, image, and pre-recorded or livestreamed videos. Digital data often become of interest to researchers as heterogeneous assemblages. These assemblages can be mobilised to tell insightful stories about the changing sociality of diasporas. They also often lead researchers to unfamiliar territories, requiring them to consider the full agency of technology in mediatising transnational social relations. This book not only presents digital methods as research strategies to cope with the evanescent and unstable nature of tracing the diaspora through digital data, but it also reimagines digital diasporas as assemblages and networks of more-than-human actors. Additionally, the book introduces various theoretical perspectives and methodological techniques for studying digital diasporas as contingent and processual assemblages, rather than static communities that merely fluctuate over time.

This chapter discusses the workings of automated systems as infrastructure for the emergence of digital diasporas and considers the methodological implications of these systems for researchers of digital diaspora. Much of how people discover information and communities on the internet is structured by recommender systems designed to automatically match internet users with digital resources through past behavioural data and user-specified requirements. While different recommender systems differ in their ultimate goals (increase sales volume, retain user subscription, increase time spent on the platform, recommend social connections), they all act as important cultural intermediaries in their core function as automated systems that organise what people encounter when they engage with digital services. The chapter gives a basic overview of how recommender systems work and discusses the implications of these systems on digital diaspora research, focusing in particular on social recommender systems and recent developments in deep learning for recommender systems.

This chapter discusses digital diasporas as empirical research sites – sites that are not naturally occurring, ready-made fields of events that are easily accessible to researchers. Digital diasporas are complex arrangements of difference that require new vocabulary beyond that of ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as autonomous entities. In working with digital diasporas as multiplicities, researchers make the movements and connections that explain not a world that exists ‘out there’, but rather tracing and assembling ongoing enactments of shared identity, common meaning, and bounded sovereignty that is nevertheless always subject to transcension. In circumscribing the digital diaspora as ongoing enactments of sociality as such, researchers should also be prepared to attend to events that may disrupt and unfasten any preconceived notion about social relations and be prepared to be taken by the actors involved to unfamiliar territories. This is particularly pertinent when technology is also considered in its full non-human agency in mediatising transnational social relations.

The computational turn in the social sciences and humanities has generated much excitement about the potential to refresh our approaches to the study of the techno-social. From natively digital to digitised data, researchers of digital diasporas increasingly find themselves working with a range of disparate digital objects. These digital objects can include anything from hyperlink to timestamps, from platform behavioural metrics such as react, share, or retweet to different media formats such as text, image, pre-recorded or livestreamed videos. Taking these disparate objects into account, this book introduces digital methods as research strategies not only for dealing with the ephemeral and unstable nature of tracing the diaspora with digital data, but also for reconceptualizing digital diasporas as assemblages and networks of more-than-human actors. The book also introduces a range of theoretical perspectives and methodological techniques to studying digital diasporas as contingent and processual hybrid collectives of heterogeneous material, cultural, and practice-based assemblages. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the digital space and transnational communities.

This chapter introduces social network analysis as a method to assemble and examine digital diasporas. Building on network and graph theories, applications of social network analysis enable the mapping and formal measuring of relationships and flows between people, groups, digital objects, and other connected information or knowledge entities. The chapter introduces a range of basic network statistics and theories that are useful to researchers of diaspora, followed by a case study of how these statistics and theories can be applied to the study of Vietnamese traditional medicine networks on Facebook. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the opportunities and challenges that social network analysis poses for the study of digital diaspora, highlighting the deliberative nature of this method in setting parameters around constructed networks, and outlining the theoretical implications that this method could have for diaspora studies.

This chapter introduces network analysis as multidisciplinary inquiry and discusses how network analysis can be embraced for the qualitative-quantitative study of diasporas. The chapter begins with an overview of the historical roots of network analysis and its multidisciplinary practice in contemporary scholarship. It proceeds by introducing Actor-Network Theory and the sociology of Gabriel Tarde as the paradigm's chosen philosophical and algorithmic ancestor. Distinct from similar concepts such as group or community, network as a conceptual anchor enables relational and formalist accounts of interconnections between network actors – often human to human, but also human to nonhuman. The chapter discusses the tensions between the relational and the formalist approaches to network theory and suggests how both can be operationalised to assemble digital diasporas using a variety of data types. This is accompanied by a practical discussion of the quantification of qualitative phenomena – such as diaspora – and the kind of data required for such a task. The chapter ends with a discussion of the e-Diasporas Atlas project as a case study of the quantification of diasporic networks using web data.

This article explains the widespread adoption of Quick Response (QR) codes from a media genealogy perspective. Understanding QR codes as more than the materiality of their machinic embodiments and rather as a method of systematically and repeatedly addressing emergent problems, I argue that the operative logic of QR code is that of convenient efficiency. Convenient efficiency captures three dynamics that drive QR codes’ ubiquity: the potentiality of spontaneous system synergies (system/distributed convenience coupled with streamlined efficiency); the autonomy of the subjects involved as part of this cybernetic system (personal convenience coupled with stacked efficiency); and the relative independence of the networks/assemblages that these practices constitute (convenient efficiency). That the convergence between convenience and efficiency as driving forces in contemporary technological culture has origins in the shop floor is consequential to the way motion, time and the body become disciplined—as well as the epistemological practices that cohere around these forces.

This paper articulates the emergence of the user-citizen as a result of techno-solutionist approaches to pandemic management by tracing the rapid infrastructuralisation of surveillance in and through the platformisation of pandemic governance in Vietnam. Coinciding with Vietnam’s rollout of chip-based national identification cards for citizens over the age of 14, the development of a one-stop ‘super-app’ solution that streamlines data flows across different domains of authority happened in a context where platforms were increasingly discussed alongside, and understood on the same terms as, infrastructure. By conducting situational analysis of publicly available policy documents and official government communication, the paper traces how pandemic platforms contract and expand in response to evolving pandemic management needs, and gives an account of the evolution of institutional dependency across different domains of authority and technology development. Using Vietnam as a case study, this paper contributes to ongoing theorisation at the intersection of platformisation and infrastructuralisation in pandemic social service provision. The paper is an invitation to examine the increasing entanglements of technology and citizenship performances around the world as they unfold throughout the course of the pandemic and beyond.