In ‘the challenge of the digital’ we explore how social science methods and research are being challenged and reconfigured by developments in the collection, storage, networking, processing and analysis of digital data, and how new sources such as digitized transactional data have descriptive potential for the analysis of ‘whole populations’. Work within this area is focussed n a number of ways:

• Digital devices and dataworlds is exploring digital data and devices in government, commerce and society, their relevance for policy, and on how empirical social science research can engage with these new methods. Sites include: population data; digital urban modelling; Web 2.0 devices on social categorisation; and commercial data integration on households.  We created a blog to discuss how data and Web 2.0 devices were mobilised in the general election, and are exploring international collaborations on digital methods.
• Audience Devices: the Politics and Performativity of Audience research at the BBC. Here we build on Theme 2's analysis of BBC World Service research to track changes in different methods for performatively constructing audiences since the 1930s as an expression of changes in national identity and changing media technologies. A series of briefing and planning meetings have been organised by Gillespie with Audience Researchers at Bush House to present and discuss the SLOM framework in relation to the ‘audience device’ and forge a shared research agenda.
• Visual Devices and Power: here we explore how the act of seeing has functioned in different historical settings, and the role played by visuality in conceptualising historical epochs will be developed further. Our work has included a seminar on Digital Visualisation and Power; Museology, Visuality & Power, and a further seminar on ‘drawing’ to explore the ways in which drawing intersects with participants' work (involving the OU Design Group, OU academics from Politics and International Relations and Psychology)
• Narratives of Knowledge failure: with Theme 1 we are laying the ground for an analysis of the knowledge-implications of the 2008 financial crisis, by relating approaches to knowledge and narrative in finance with those developed in sociology and STS.