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Abstract
The three articles comprising this thesis engage with how digitalisation and computerisation transform sociological research and how classification and categorisation shape our understanding of social phenomena since the mid-20th century. It demonstrates the necessity of mixed methods and historically informed approaches in digital sociology. The first article combines qualitative archival analysis with a novel manually constructed dataset of ASA graduate student award winners and structural topic modelling to explore transformation, institutionally within ASA and disciplinary sociology at large, framed around boundary work and object. The second article treats a digital payment industry podcast as an audio archive and integrates transcript analysis, digital ethnography and interviews to examine how digital payment infrastructures evolved and have become increasingly personalised, jurisdictionally complex, and embedded. The third article employs digital and in-person archival research alongside interviews with WTO legal experts to analyse how "digital trade" and “cross-border data flows” have been shaped as contested institutional categories. Together, the articles demonstrate that computational approaches, when used in isolation, risk oversimplifying complex sociological phenomena and historical dimensions. By integrating different digital and analogue methodological approaches, the thesis provides theoretically grounded insights into classification processes. It argues for a digital sociology that treats computation as complementary to, rather than replacement of, analogue sociological methods to advance epistemological and conceptual understanding in the discipline.