Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online

287 Pages·2015·6.716 MB·English

by  Eszter Hargittai, Christian Sandvig (eds.)

Digital Research Confidential

Digital Research Confidential
The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online
edited by Eszter Hargittai and Christian Sandvig
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2015 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN: 978-0-262-02988-9
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To our families for teaching us to appreciate the details.
The Microbe
The microbe is so very small
You cannot make him out at all,
But many sanguine people hope
To see him through a microscope.
His jointed tongue that lies beneath
A hundred curious rows of teeth;
His seven tufted tails with lots
Of lovely pink and purple spots,
On each of which a pattern stands,
Composed of forty separate bands;
His eyebrows of a tender green;
All these have never yet been seen—
But Scientists, who ought to know,
Assure us that they must be so...
Oh! Let us never, never doubt
What nobody is sure about!
—Hilaire Belloc (1912)
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1 How to Think about Digital Research 1
Christian Sandvig and Eszter Hargittai
2 Read/Write the Digital Archive: Strategies for Historical
Web Research 29
Megan Sapnar Ankerson
3 Flash Mobs and the Social Life of Public Spaces: Analyzing Online
Visual Data to Study New Forms of Sociability 55
Virág Molnár and Aron Hsiao
4 Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic
Data in a Networked Era 79
danah boyd
5 The Ethnographic Study of Visual Culture in the Age of
Digitization 103
Paul M. Leonardi
6 Social Software as Social Science 139
Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios
7 Hired Hands and Dubious Guesses: Adventures in Crowdsourced
Data Collection 155
Aaron Shaw
viii Contents
8 How Local Is User-Generated Content? A 9,000+-Word Essay on
Answering a Five-Word Research Question 173
Brent Hecht and Darren Gergle
9 The Art of Web Crawling for Social Science Research 201
Michelle Shumate and Matthew S. Weber
10 Big Data, Big Problems, Big Opportunities: Using Internet Log
Data to Conduct Social Network Analysis Research 223
Brooke Foucault Welles
11 When Should We Use Real Names in Published Accounts of
Internet Research? 243
Amy Bruckman, Kurt Luther, and Casey Fiesler
Contributors 259
Index 263
Preface
Eszter Hargittai and Christian Sandvig
The premise of this book and its precursor (H argittai 2009) is that we
need more frank, first-person, behind-the-scenes talk about research
methods. While “research methods” often sound boring or scary to stu-
dents, there is no denying that how a research project is planned and
executed is one of the foundations of research. Must methods be boring
or scary? We think not. With several years of experience teaching courses
about how to research digital media, and after engaging in such research
ourselves, we are well aware of the many challenges such projects can
face. But they can also be some of the most exciting work in which schol-
ars can engage today! They need not elicit anxiety or fear, nor should they
be associated with tedium or ennui. However, when details are left out of
research write-ups (as they often are) and when challenges are not explic-
itly acknowledged in formal outputs (as they often are not), it is under-
standable that newcomers to such domains may be at a loss, confused and
frustrated about how to proceed or about why their approaches are not
working as expected. The goal of this collection is to articulate in detail
the realities of doing social science research in our digital age so as to
offer readers guidance on how to proceed with their own projects.
Whether the Internet is the object of study or it is a means to gather
data about more traditional questions of interest—or both—many social
science research projects in the 21st century require new methodological
considerations. While digital media offer opportunities for social scien-
tists, they come with their own set of challenges. The chapters in this
volume are not shy to invite the reader into the delicate specifics of what
happens backstage during research projects. The goal is to help research-
ers, from those starting out to those with decades of experience, appreci-
ate what is new and exciting, and also what requires careful thought and