Interpretivist methods in the digital age: methodologies and epistemologies

The twentieth-century expansion of interpretivist methods in the social sciences could be characterised as nothing short of an epistemological revolution. Political science is unique for the way that Interpretive scholarship has been marginalised, where elsewhere it has transformed disciplines, becoming a normal part of inquiry. At the same time, the communications revolution has had an extraordinary impact on both knowledge production and political and social change. While computational methods and big data have renewed political science's confidence in quantification, interpretivist scholars have been slow to address how digital data and communications affordances impact both what we study and how we study it. This chapter points out that communications studies as a field is founded upon interpretivist assumptions and is part of this methodological revolution. What this means for Political Science is that given the widespread impact of the Interpretivist Turn there is simply no legitimate reason for the continued marginalisation of Interpretivist Methods. What it means for interpretivists in Political Science is that there is already a rich seam of social theory and methodological practice upon which Interpretivists can draw for a Digital Interpretivist Political Science and which provides scope for connecting interpretivists across disciplinary divides. The aim of this chapter is to provide an introduction to this social theory and cross disciplinary spaces in hopes of facilitating these kinds of connections.