Digital Research Methods

Weller, Susie (2015) The potentials and pitfalls of using Skype for qualitative (longitudinal) interviews. NCRM Working Paper. NCRM
The use of digital communication technologies has become increasingly commonplace in social research. Yet, sparse attention has been paid to the potential of such technologies in Qualitative Longitudinal Research (QLR). This paper explores the implications of introducing one such technology, internet video calls (e.g. Skype, FaceTime, Google Hangouts), as a new mode of data collection into an established QLR study that has primarily generated data using biographical interviews conducted in participants’ homes. The paper draws on the ‘Your Space’ project; a decade-long study following the lives of up to 52 young people from across Britain. Funded as one of eleven ESRC National Centre for Research Method’s ‘Methodological Innovation Projects’ the most recent phase of the project investigates the implications of shifting from physical co-present interviewing to remote modes on key issues for QLR research such as sample maintenance, research relationship continuity, and rapport. In doing so, it assesses whether internet video calls might be a useful means of conducting short ‘catch-up’ interviews between the main waves of data collection, or as an alternative way of carrying out case study intensive interviews.

"Emergent Digital Ethnographic Methods for Social Research" aims to equip social researchers in academia and industry with the knowledge to understand five emergent technologies and their methodological applications to digital ethnography. The chapter defines digital ethnography, discusses the benefits and weaknesses of this method, and provides examples of digital ethnographies. The chapter also presents a thorough examination of five digital ethnographic technologies: fieldnotes with blogs/wikis, embedded ethnographic technologies, digital pens, CMS groupware, and Twitter. Despite the vast possibilities presented by emergent technologies, the chapter argues for multiple ethnographic methods (i.e., digital methods combined with traditional, face-to-face ethnography). The chapter also includes a discussion of the costs, benefits, ethical implications, and future directions of digital ethnographies. Ultimately, the chapter sees digital ethnographic methods for social inquiry continuing to expand with developments in ubiquitous computing.

Le tracce digitali lasciate dagli utenti Internet nel corso delle loro pratiche quotidiane sul medium offrono nuove opportunità per una ricerca sociale su larga scala, ma attenta ai contesti e ai processi dell’interazione sociale. Se i metodi di ricerca quantitativi e qualitativi “analogici” si basano in genere su fonti differenti – come, per esempio, inchieste campionarie da un lato e interviste discorsive dall’altro – questa distinzione risulta essere decisamente più sfumata nel caso dei dati digitali. Online, uno stesso fenomeno sociale può essere osservato contemporaneamente al livello quantitativo macro dei trend di ricerca degli utenti su scala nazionale, e al livello qualitativo micro delle situazioni sociali digitalmente mediate. Una similitudine efficace è quella con Google Earth, servizio online che rende osservabile la superficie terrestre registrata in ogni minimo dettaglio, da interi continenti alle singole macchine incolonnate in autostrada. Una Terra osservabile da molto in alto, ma anche, zoomando, per così dire, da molto, molto vicino – esattamente come accade con le culture digitali riprodotte sui social media. I metodi digitali si prestano dunque a un approccio ibrido, misto, quali-quantitativo. Questa sintesi metodologica è possibile tenendo conto delle caratteristiche peculiari dei dati circolanti in Rete e sui social media. Esse saranno oggetto del prossimo paragrafo, che affronterà fondamenti, criticità e prospettive dell’analisi dei dati digitali. Queste premesse ci condurranno a un secondo muro disciplinare da abbattere: quello tra ricerca online e offline. È ormai pressoché impossibile fare ricerca sociale, in particolare qualitativa, senza imbattersi nelle vite digitali degli individui studiati offline; allo stesso tempo, è raro condurre studi puramente digitali senza interrogarsi sulle vite degli utenti aldilà dello schermo. I metodi digitali, pertanto, devono rappresentare lo strumento, e non il fine, di ricerche capaci di abbracciare diversi sguardi sul reale, macro e micro così come online e offline.

The rise of digital technologies has the potential to open new directions in ethnography. Despite the ubiquity of these technologies, their infiltration into popular sociological research methods is still limited compared to the insatiable uptake of online scholarly research portals. This article argues that social researchers cannot afford to continue this trend. Building upon pioneering work in `digital ethnography', I critically examine the possibilities and problems of four new technologies — online questionnaires, digital video, social networking websites, and blogs — and their potential impacts on the research relationship. The article concludes that a balanced combination of physical and digital ethnography not only gives researchers a larger and more exciting array of methods, but also enables them to demarginalize the voice of respondents. However, access to these technologies remains stratified by class, race, and gender of both researchers and respondents.

Of approximately 40 billion photos posted on Instagram, only 282 million are selfies-just 0.7%. Thus, for all its zeitgeisty appeal, the selfie is in fact a niche phenomenon in the larger context of Instagram genres. Noting this fact, we identified an opportunity to engage with scholars from all over the world with the challenge of proposing new theories and approaches capable of unlocking the full socio-anthropological potential of Instagram. As the articles collected in this special issue testify, Instagram has an enormous impact on people's everyday lives on many levels, socially, culturally, economically and politically, and so, indubitably, it deserves rigorous academic attention. Given the scale and complexity of these impacts, studying Instagram poses different kinds of challenges and many gaps are still to be filled. With this special issue we don't claim to resolve all the issues noted above. More modestly, our goal is to kick-start a fruitful conversation among social media scholars interested in furthering Instagram studies.

Today's society is characterised by an increase in relational, connective and communicative practices based on mobile devices and social media. It is clear that the Internet has become pervasive, an element leading to a widespread remodelling of the way we live, work and communicate. The dimensions of this remodel are so significant that several scholars urge a focus on the epochal changes our society is currently undergoing, calling for new paradigms of interpretation to describe the social dynamics observed. What does this mean in terms of sociological theory?
This editorial initiative is driven by an attempt to understand whether the traditional concepts of sociology are changing, how this change is occurring, and what words define this new social configuration. The goal of this volume is, in other words, to summarise, on the theoretical level, several sociological issues in the light of the transformations caused by the advent of the web society. Each author has been asked, through a structurisation for lemmas, to reconsider "classic" theories in view of any changes that have occurred, and to outline possible prospects.

Linda Lombi, Ph.D in Sociology, is an Assistant Professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan where she teaches Sociology and Methods (Faculty of Education Science). Her research interests focus on health sociology, citizen science, participatory medicine, digital narratives, digital research, and Big Data.

Michele Marzulli, Ph.D in Sociology, is an adjunct professor at the University of Trento, Department of Sociology and Social Research, and at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan (Faculty of Education Science and Medicine). His research interests focus on studies of welfare regime changes, health and medicine sociology, and qualitative research methods.

This article explores the intersection between women and technology with an experimental research design that uses online search engine data and digital methods (Rogers 2002, 2004, 2013). We respond to Blagojevic's (2016) call for online mapping of gender equality stakeholders by incorporating the practice of 'issue mapping', which Rogers et al. (2015) conceptualise as a series of techniques that can be used to map the network of actors around a public issue, and to understand the ways they associate with one another. Specifically , we apply the software tool IssueCrawler and its co-link analysis of relevant queries to study national Google search result pages for Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia. We ask, what types of stakeholders are prevalent around the topic of 'women in technology' in the local contexts (demarcated by the national Google result pages) of these three countries? Are they country-specific or do they cross national borders? To what extent do they associate with each other? Which actors are in the centre of the identified networks and which are on the periphery? The authors found that the issue networks of all three countries were heavily dominated by media and government actors, followed by business, entrepreneurial and non-governmental sites, and websites containing information on EU grants. The national speci-ficity, however, was mostly embedded in the groupings of these actors; whether they were densely or loosely interlinked with each other, and whether they were present or absent from the maps. Keywords: Women, technology, web epistemology, hyperlink analysis, issue network maps he aim of this experimental research is to gain a better understanding of the status of 'women in technology' by incorporating a multi-stakeholder approach and using on-line search data as our object of analysis. We set out to map the associations between stake-holders in the context of the Google search result pages of Bulgaria, Croatia and Serbia, thus making the informational structure and hierarchies of the national Google(s) visible. The topic of 'women in technology' has been widely studied by Bulgarian, Croatian and Serbian T Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media (digitalicons.org), N o 19 (2018): 93-115.

El trabajo aborda la emergencia de las Humanidades Digitales y justifica los principales ejes en que confluye con los valores y prácticas de las Ciencias de la Información. Se presenta el contexto académico y profesional de las Ciencias de la Información en Cuba como escenario para entronizar los principales contenidos que caracterizan la
enseñanza y producción de las comunidades de humanistas digitales. Desde el análisis del estado de las relaciones interdisciplinares y de los objetivos y metas de la agenda 2030, especialmente lo relacionado con el acceso pleno a la información, se propone una mirada transversal, adaptada a la realidad nacional, para intervenir en el actual y
relativo distanciamiento entre los campos de las Humanidades Digitales y las Ciencias de la Información. Esta investigación concluye la primera etapa de desarrollo del Grupo de investigación académica Humanidades
Digitales y Ciencias de la Información (HDCICuba), proyecto institucional de la Facultad de Comunicación de la Universidad de La Habana.

With the increasing digitalization and datafication of consumption brought by platforms such as Amazon, Netflix and Spotify, digital traces of taste are constantly generated as by-products of consumers' everyday communications and activities. However, these data have not been fully exploited in the cross-disciplinary study of taste phenomena. This paper represents a first attempt to develop a comprehensive methodological framework for “augmenting” taste research through the analysis of digital traces. The proposed framework is theory-driven, multi-method, context-sensitive, and reflexive about platforms' affordances. Three distinct methodological pathways are examined, contributing to research on taste cultures, regimes and experiences. Empirical data about Italian hip-hop culture on YouTube are employed for illustrative purposes. Key methodological and theoretical implications for consumer research are discussed.

We explore the place that the digital can occupy in teachers’ pedagogical practices around social justice and especially how memory-work can deepen and enhance teacher practices. Like Walter Benjamin, we see memory as being a medium for exploring the past and where the digital provides
greater opportunities for teachers to work productively across geographical contexts that are wrestling with issues of social justice. We argue for the potential of Michael Rothberg’s notion of multidirectional memory as a logical direction in which to pursue notions of cross-border, transnational productive
remembering facilitated by digital means. We also pose a number of questions we see as critical for working through and “reflecting forward” on issues central to digital scholarship within the context of multidirectional memory.

Online social media presents an opportunity for innovative recruitment and data collection methods. Researchers suggest that participants engage actively in online research and have found that global and instantaneous data collection is possible using social media and that richly detailed research data can be collected. However, despite the widespread use of online research, there have been relatively few attempts to collect research data using a blog with dedicated use for this purpose.
An open Wordpress.com blog has been created to collect data about researcher experiences related to ethical challenges of using community-based participatory action research processes. Participants are researchers involved in community based participatory research. Data is being collected using the blog as a research site. Participants have been recruited through notices in public and social media. A notice about the research project has been generated on Twitter, Facebook and ResearchGate with a link to the Wordpress.com blog research site. Posting to the comments box of the blog implies consent to participate. The use of a blog permits collection of data, with minimal risk, at an international level, within the time constraints of the study and allows for direct transfer from the Wordpress.com blog site to a data analysis program eliminating the need for recording and transcription. Blogging also offers opportunities for innovatively disseminating research results to a wider audience allowing researchers to be more transparent about research practices. The success of this method has implications for future online qualitative research across disciplines.