This article introduces an interpretative approach to the analysis of situations in computational settings called situational analytics. I outline the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of this approach, which is still under development, and show how it can be used to surface situations from large data sets derived from online platforms such as YouTube. Situational analytics extends to computationally-mediated settings a qualitative methodology developed by Adele Clarke, Situational Analysis (2005), which uses data mapping to detect heterogeneous entities in fieldwork data to determine ‘what makes a difference’ in a situation. Situational analytics scales up this methodology to analyse situations latent in computational data sets with semi-automated methods of textual and visual analysis. I discuss how this approach deviates from recent analyses of situations in computational social science, and argue that Clarke’s framework renders tractable a fundamental methodological problem that arises in this area of research: while social researchers turn to computational settings in order to analyse social life, the social processes unfolding in these envirnoments are fundamentally affected by the computational architectures in which they occur. Situational analytics offers a way to address this problematic by making a heterogeneously composed situation – involving social, technical and media elements – the unit of computational analysis. To conclude, I show how situational analytics can be applied in a case study of YouTube videos featuring intelligent vehicles and discuss how situational analysis itself needs to be elaborated if we are to come to terms with computational transformations of the situational fabric of social life.

中文翻译：

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对于情境分析：一种在计算环境中研究情境的解释性方法

本文介绍了一种在计算环境中分析情境的解释性方法，称为情境分析。我概述了这种仍在开发中的方法的理论和方法论基础，并展示了如何将其用于从来自 YouTube 等在线平台的大型数据集中显示情况。情境分析扩展到以计算为中介的设置，这是一种由阿黛尔·克拉克 (Adele Clarke) 在情境分析 (2005) 中开发的定性方法，该方法使用数据映射来检测实地工作数据中的异质实体，以确定情境中的“差异所在”。情境分析扩展了这种方法，以使用文本和视觉分析的半自动化方法来分析计算数据集中的潜在情境。我讨论了这种方法如何偏离最近对计算社会科学情况的分析，并认为克拉克的框架使该研究领域出现的一个基本方法论问题变得易于处理：当社会研究人员转向计算环境以分析社会生活时，在这些环境中展开的社会过程从根本上受到它们所在的计算架构的影响。情境分析提供了一种解决这个问题的方法，它通过将一个异构组合的情境——涉及社会、技术和媒体元素——作为计算分析的单元。总结一下，