A reality check(list) for digital methods

TY - JOUR

T1 - A reality check(list) for digital methods

AU - Venturini, Tommaso

AU - Bounegru, Liliana

AU - Gray, Jonathan

AU - Rogers, Richard

PY - 2018

Y1 - 2018

N2 - Digital Methods can be defined as the repurposing of the inscriptions generated by digital media for the study of collective phenomena. The strength of these methods comes from their capacity to take advantage of the data and computational capacities of online platforms; their weakness comes from the difficulty to separate the phenomena that they investigate from the features of the media in which they manifest (‘the medium is the message’, according to McLuhan’s 1964 dictum). In this article, we discuss various methodological difficulties deriving from the lack of separation between medium and message and propose eight practical precautions to deal with it.

AB - Digital Methods can be defined as the repurposing of the inscriptions generated by digital media for the study of collective phenomena. The strength of these methods comes from their capacity to take advantage of the data and computational capacities of online platforms; their weakness comes from the difficulty to separate the phenomena that they investigate from the features of the media in which they manifest (‘the medium is the message’, according to McLuhan’s 1964 dictum). In this article, we discuss various methodological difficulties deriving from the lack of separation between medium and message and propose eight practical precautions to deal with it.

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85055756401&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1177/1461444818769236

DO - 10.1177/1461444818769236

M3 - Article

SN - 1461-4448

VL - 20

SP - 4195

EP - 4217

JO - New media & society

JF - New media & society

IS - 11

ER -