Solving social problems with data: Data practitioners' work on technological solutions in hackathon competitions

Dahl, Patrik 2025. Solving social problems with data: Data practitioners' work on technological solutions in hackathon competitions. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

How does data become a solution to social problems? This thesis reports on an ethnomethodologically informed ethnographic case study of problem solving prac tices in a data-centred hackathon event. It takes C. Wright Mills’s conceptual cou plet of the sociological and engineering imagination as a starting point and ex plores how data practitioners accomplish socio-technical data imaginaries and the universality of data in their situated work on transforming social problems into data-technological problems that can be ‘solved’ with data-based approaches. Within the hackathon as a publicly oriented setting and the spectacle of data it organises as a civic ritual, data practitioners present their data-technological solu tions as socio-technical moral entrepreneurs aligning with the normative struc tures of problem formulations in socio-technical, digital societies. The analysis of their pitches shows how they do so in ways that are situated in presentation for mats, project work and the rules and challenges of the hackathon competition. The pitch presentations form the centre of the analysis. It explores how the pitch presenters configure social problems and the users and societies that have them and how they demonstrate their technologies’ capacities to tackle or ‘solve’ these problems. It shows how the speakers’ ethno-methods for formulating, chaining and (re)configuring problems instantiate socio-technical imagining as a situated prac tice that points to and draws on resources beyond the local setting of the hacka thon stage to produce convincing versions of social and data problems. In the live demonstrations of technology, the speakers, likewise, engage in the imaginary work of producing a mock up, presenting their technologies as technologies-in-use and technologies capable of performing actions beyond the confines of data anal ysis and visualisation. These findings are then brought together in an interpretative schema for study ing pitches, which leads into reflections on the role of pitches in socio-technical change, and the democratic potential of hackathons as civic rituals.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 May 2026
Last Modified:	06 Aug 2026 14:22
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/186798

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