Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online

by Eszter Hargittai (Editor), Christian Sandvig (Editor)

Overview

Behind-the-scenes stories of how Internet research projects actually get done.

The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected. Digital Research Confidential offers scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers' mistakes—and their successes.

The book—a follow-up to Eszter Hargittai's widely read Research Confidential —presents behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stories of digital research projects, written by established and rising scholars. They discuss such challenges as archiving, Web crawling, crowdsourcing, and confidentiality. They do not shrink from specifics, describing such research hiccups as an ethnographic interview so emotionally draining that afterward the researcher retreated to a bathroom to cry, and the seemingly simple research question about Wikipedia that mushroomed into years of work on millions of data points. Digital Research Confidential will be an essential resource for scholars in every field.

Contributors
Megan Sapnar Ankerson, danah boyd, Amy Bruckman, Casey Fiesler, Brooke Foucault Welles, Darren Gergle, Eric Gilbert, Eszter Hargittai, Brent Hecht, Aron Hsiao, Karrie Karahalios, Paul Leonardi, Kurt Luther, Virág Molnár, Christian Sandvig, Aaron Shaw, Michelle Shumate, Matthew Weber

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262528207
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	12/11/2015
Series:	The MIT Press
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Eszter Hargittai is Professor in the Communication Studies Department and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, where she heads the Web Use Project. She is the editor of Research Confidential.

Christian Sandvig is Associate Professor in the Department of Communications Studies and the School of Information at the University of Michigan and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Christian Sandvig is Associate Professor in the Department of Communications Studies and the School of Information at the University of Michigan and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Eszter Hargittai is Professor in the Communication Studies Department and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, where she heads the Web Use Project. She is the editor of Research Confidential.

Paul M. Leonardi is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Car Crashes without Cars (MIT Press).

Brooke Foucault Welles is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northeastern University.

Table of Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

1 How to Think about Digital Research Christian Sandvig Eszter Hargittai 1

2 Read/Write the Digital Archive: Strategies for Historical Web Research Megan Sapnar Ankerson 29

3 Flash Mobs and the Social Life of Public Spaces: Analyzing Online Visual Data to Study New Forms of Sociability Virág Molnár Aron Hsiao 55

4 Making Sense of Teen Life: Strategies for Capturing Ethnographic Data in a Networked Era Danah boyd 79

5 The Ethnographic Study of Visual Culture in the Age of Digitization Paul M. Leonardi 103

6 Social Software as social Science Eric Gilbert Karrie Karahalios 139

7 Hired Hands and Dubious Guesses: Adventures in Crowdsourced Data Collection Aaron Shaw 155

8 How Local Is User-Generated Content? A 9,000+-Word Essay on Answering a Five-Word Research Question Brent Hecht Darren Gergle 173

9 The Art of Web Crawling for Social Science Research Michelle Shumate Matthew S. Weber 201

10 Big Data, Big Problems, Big Opportunities: Using Internet Log Data to Conduct Social Network Analysis Research Brooke Foucault Welles 223

11 When Should We Use Real Names in Published Accounts of Internet Research? Amy Bruckman Kurt Luther Casey Fiesler 243

Contributors 259

Index 263