I was pleased to see Fabio Rojas make an open invitation for more female scholars on OrgTheory. Writing for a technically-oriented blog, I’ve been painfully aware of the dearth of female voices expressed here. And as computational social scientists, we should be incredibly wary of the possibility of reproducing many of the same kinds of inequalities that have plagued computer science and tech at-large. We see this when “big data isn’t big enough“, as Jen Schradie has put it, when non-dominant voices are shushed in myriad different ways online, and I fear it when all our current contributors are men. Sociology has gone a long way to open up space for more “scholars at the margins” (a term I’m taking from Eric Grollman and his blog Conditionally Accepted), but there’s still a long way to go.
This is, then, an open invitation for anyone to contribute to Bad Hessian, especially women, people of color, queer people, people with disabilities, working-class or poor people, fat people, immigrants, and single parents. Our doors are always open for guest contributors and new regular contributors. Computational social science ought to be as committed as possible to not only bringing computational methods into the social sciences, but making sure that everyone, especially those at the margins, have a place to speak to and engage with those methods.