Digital Sociology MSc

Study our MSc Digital Sociology at the UK's top-ranked department for sociological research according to REF 2021 results, and graduate equipped to join the field of knowledge production and practice sitting at the intersection of digital life and the social world.

What is digital sociology?

The world and our societies are changing fast, and Digital is at the centre of this whirlwind. 

As founders of the Edinburgh MSc Digital Sociology programme, faculty members Kate Orton-Johnson and Nick Prior noted in their foundational volume on Digital Sociology, “few spheres of social enquiry are insulated from some form of digital”.

Indeed, as Edinburgh’s Head of Sociology Karen Gregory, writing with MacArthur Fellow Tressie McMillan Cottom and esteemed Professor Jessie Daniels, put it in their own pioneering exposition of Digital Sociologies: “The transformations and challenges of digital technologies offer a chance to reinvigorate the sociological imagination.”

Digital Sociology is a rethinking of our assumptions about society as sociologists that centres digital mediation in new social understandings.

What do digital sociologists do?

As Digital Sociologists, we ask questions about how technologies are changing lifeworlds while simultaneously using the most creative and advanced digital and computational research methods to answer those questions. 

Many students in our programme focus on using traditional qualitative methods in interviews adapted to the digital context to advance cutting edge understandings of questions related to the social and the digital.

Others of our students use advanced computational methods to come with new perspectives on classic deep questions of sociology.

Some combine both in the innovative pluralistic approach that represents a unique strength of Edinburgh Sociology.

What research is going on in Digital Sociology right now?

These are some of the questions our faculty are researching:

* How does platform work and surveillance capitalism shape bodies, time, and identities?

* How is the relationship between “distance” and “family” changing in the wake of instant always-online messaging and digital communications?

* How might examining “glitches”—technological accidents—help us rethink classical notions in sociology of structure, agency, action, and intention?

* What can the a “sociology of selfies” tell us about community, the self, gender, consumption, power, exclusion, inequality, and the “real” versus the digital?

* How can tech workers effectively organise to resist the worst excesses of Big Tech?

Study Options

The MSc in Digital Sociology is offered as a one-year full-time programme.

Digital Sociology with Social Data Science pathway

Beginning in the 2025/26 academic year, students wishing to specialise in computational methods for analysing digital society can choose to transition to a dedicated Social Data Science pathway during their first semester. 

Academic staff will provide guidance on the skills required for pathway courses. 

Students who complete 60 credits of computational methods courses (computational sociology, computational text analysis, and social network analysis) will receive the MSc in Digital Sociology with Social Data Science. Students joining the pathway are also expected to use these methods in their dissertation.

The Digital Sociology with Social Data Science pathway is suitable for students with some prior experience with statistics and/or statistical programming, or a strong motivation to acquire these skills.