Center for Uncertainty Studies Blog

From September 25 to 28, 2023, the Digital History Working Group at Bielefeld University welcomed participants to the Digital Academy, themed "From Uncertainty to Action: Advancing Research with Digital Data." This event delved into the complexities of data-based research, exploring strategies to navigate uncertainties within the Digital Humanities. In a series of blog posts, four attendees of the workshop program share insights into their work on data collections and analysis and reflect on the knowledge gained from the interdisciplinary discussions at the Digital Academy. Learn more about the event visiting the Digital Academy Website.

Reflections on uncertainty in a mixed methods study on Heimat, Affect, and Whiteness

by Friederike Windel

As a participant of the Digital Academy in Fall 2023, I was invited to think about uncertainty in my digital research process. Trained in critical social psychology, I would like to take the opportunity to reflect on my dissertation process in relation to digital and social psychological research, emphasizing the need for interdisciplinary dialogue. 

Social psychological studies of social media run the risk of reproducing rationalistic, predictability-driven analyses that treat digital data as neutral. Data science reproduces the ideological undercurrent and practices of data science that actively excludes any acknowledgment of a human-made digital space governed by artificial intelligence that “has produced racialized, gendered, and classed models of the self, delivered with imperialist rhetorics of colonization and conquest” (Yarden-Katz 2020, 6). 

Part of my dissertation responds to concerns about data science’s reproduction of oppressive practices by making visible examples on German-speaking Twitter of dominant reproductions of Heimat, broadly defined as “home” or “homeland” in German-speaking contexts. 

Heimat is a widely used term, both in politics and in everyday language. I was interested in understanding the instances better in which Heimat intersected with racial practices and white privilege in contemporary and historical discussions and constructions of Heimat. My focus was on the affective manifestations of Whiteness and nationalism to challenge and attempt to interrupt rationalist notions that attempt to cleanly categorize constructs like White supremacy or nationalism based on linguistic practices and remove its inherent emotional processes. 

Using computational social science (CSS) and discourse analytical methods for part of the dissertation, I analyzed how Heimat is discussed, embodied, and made sense of in affective ways on German-speaking Twitter between January 2018 and July 2022. The dissertation asked how Heimat functions affectively to (re)produce and maintain ideologies like white supremacy and nationalism. 

The question of uncertainty and ambiguity was present throughout the process of writing the dissertation. 

Uncertainty and the theoretical framework

In its theoretical manifestations, I challenged mainstream definitions of Heimat that claim a neutral, nostalgic, and apolitical relationship with/to the German nation as former interior minister Horst Seehofer aimed for when he added Heimat to the interior ministry’s name in 2018. My interest was in the ways in which this concept has been tightly intertwined with the political, especially, in nationalist interests. Critical theorist Blickle (2002) has shown that discourses around Heimat are revived in the public consciousness periodically when the German nation considers itself unstable and wants to redefine itself. Thus, one of the key societal processes surrounding Heimat is that it becomes more prevalent when there is a feeling of uncertainty about national identity and the desire for more stability. Yet the idea of a stable, coherent nation is a myth that has been reproduced since modern nation-building. To examine the ways in which Heimat is constructed, I looked at everyday practices and constructions of this term.

Another central concept that I used in my dissertation is Whiteness. Similar to Heimat, I was interested in its daily, often implicit, manifestations, where Whiteness is the unnamed and unmarked norm that secures the power of white people (Frankenberg 1988) through material, discursive, and affective processes. I argue that rather than treating Whiteness solely as identity, it is intertwined with the historically constructed, political, cultural, and socio-economic system of white supremacy that subjugates people racialized as not white. This focus on its structural manifestation is as important in digital quantitative and qualitative research. In research on social media platforms like X/Twitter, such focus allows an analysis of questions that are identity-related (like Whiteness) in ways that do not try to “find out” or focus on users’ identity but instead analyze discourses and affect connected to structure. 

This desire to “find out” identity in psychological research comes from the dominant perception that experimental research is the gold standard of psychological study. Often, identity categories are portrayed in singular ways or attempted in an intersectional way, added onto each other. These kinds of studies compare categories, estimate effects, or analyze relationships of variables. While such experimental research has an important place for some psychological questions, it risks reproducing ideas of cleanliness of lived experiences and minimizes the influence and impact of structural factors. Furthermore, it reinforces social categories that were artificially created. Thus, psychological research runs the same risk as data science to not tolerate the uncertainty and ambiguity of data. Putting a structural view of Whiteness in the forefront of the analysis thus allows for a better understanding of its connection to everyday processes, as well as for understanding the impact that AI systems have by harming “vulnerable groups and propagate(ing) societal biases” (Jo & Gebru 2020, 306). 

The making of Whiteness is a messy process that occurs in practice, in language, in the body, and in affect. Following social psychologist Derek Hook’s theory of the affective technology of Whiteness (2005), I examined the affective formations of Heimat via “ardent forms of belonging which work to assert certain exclusionary relations of cultural/national /historical ownership and privilege” (77). This affective focus, applying the Foucauldian concept of technology, allowed for an analysis of the individualized practices linked to macro-political manifestations of the German state. 

Uncertainty in methodology

For the tweet analysis chapters of my dissertation, I used a mixed-methods approach combining the computational social science method of Structural Topic Modeling (STM) and the qualitative method of discourse analysis. The broad computational pattern analysis with STM served as a starting point for a thematic overview of topics present in the dataset. Such analysis also provided descriptive data about the tweets, such as the timing of specific topics and of the tweets overall. CSS requires a critical approach to address rationalist data practices. Social and Data scientist Rob Kitchin (2014) has developed such an approach arguing for an epistemology that is reflexive and acknowledges the data’s social location, the researcher’s positionality, and the politics of the social science conducted. 

In addition, CSS research requires the application of social theory and deep contextual knowledge. Thus, a “neutral” presentation of data analyses in my STM tweet chapter was not an option and required me to add contextual explanations as well as social theory that addresses the context further. The subsequent discourse analysis of a subset of tweets allowed for a deeper contextualized analysis of Heimat tweets. This approach acknowledges the uncertainty and messiness of digital data. Rather than finding neat categories for each topic estimated by the STM, a critical approach to CSS allows for an analysis rooted in structural contexts and the variety of Twitter users’ responses to it. 

Uncertainty and reflexivity

My approach to the dissertation project and my interpretations of each step of the process are rooted in my lived experiences and positionality. Following Black feminists like bell hooks. (2000) and Patricia Hill Collins (2022), I approached the dissertation from an understanding that the project and my work (the personal) are explicitly political, and that the political is personal. Related to the topic of white supremacy, my positionality as a white, able-bodied, middle-class raised, cis-woman body, I reproduce white norms, risk the centering Whiteness, or misrepresent the reality of systemic racism. These are practices that I continuously try to challenge, and part of this work is embracing the discomfort that comes with making mistakes and reproducing harm. Community and accountability play an important role in this work; and it is often in conversation with others–ones that build on imagining other futures and ones that reflect on mistakes, and highlight our embodied experiences–where an opening and continuation of the work of challenging oppressive systems occurs.  

Learning together and uncertainty in missing data 

In the research process, interdisciplinary conversations are an important part of thinking together, asking questions, and sharing ideas and approaches to questions. The Digital Academy brought together a group of digital researchers using a multiple range of methods. With a lot of historians sharing their work, I got more interested in thinking about the archive and the question of how we deal with data when it is not there. It left me thinking about the importance of archival research and the qualitative work of oral history, especially for those stories that are erased from archives or made invisible by mainstream media. This question is ever so present in our current political and social realities and demonstrates the need for understanding better digital manifestations of uncertainty as well as the ways in which uncertainty can be used to manipulate and censor groups of people.

Biographical note

Friederike Windel (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor in Psychology, Health and Gender at the American University of Paris. Friederike’s scholarship examines constructions of Whiteness, national belonging, exclusion, and affect using computational social science and qualitative research. She is committed to interdisciplinary collaborations and learning about public scholarship. 

https://www.aup.edu/profile/fwindel

References

Blickle, Peter. Heimat: A Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland. Rochester: Camden House, 2002.

Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Frankenberg, Ruth Alice Emma. White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness. Santa Cruz: University of California, 1988.

Hook, Derek. "Affecting whiteness: racism as technology of affect." International journal of critical psychology 16 (2005): 74–99.

hooks, bell. Feminist theory: From margin to center. Pluto Press, 2000.

Jo, Eun Seo, and Timnit Gebru. "Lessons from archives: Strategies for collecting sociocultural data in machine learning." Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (January 2020): 306–316. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372829.

Katz, Yarden. Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.7312/katz19490.

Kitchin, Rob. "Big Data, new epistemologies and paradigm shifts." Big data & society 1.1 (April 2014). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714528481.