Module 3.1 is designed to provide you with an overview of potential tools for collecting the data you need for digital research. Before reviewing the tutorial, we recommend that you read the following articles, which outline current conversations about qualitative internet research.

    • Baym, Nancy K “What Constitutes Quality in Qualitative Internet Research?” In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, edited by Nancy K. Baym and Annette M. Markham, 173-189. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2009.
    • Baym, Nancy K., and Annette M. Markham (eds). “Introduction: Making Smart Choices on Shifting Ground.” In Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method, vii-xix. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2009.
    • boyd, danah, and Kate Crawford. “Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a Cultural, Technological and Scholarly Phenomenon.” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 662-79.

Gathering material for digital culture research can be daunting: the sheer scale of what is available and possible can be overwhelming, and when something captures popular attention, it can quickly become impossible to read everything out there. A lot of the methods we’ll be using are strategies for sorting through the noise and finding useful data in this overwhelming space.

Many of the best tools for collecting data are difficult to configure, and expect you to have significant knowledge of programming. This is because a lot of those tools are developed by researchers who don’t need a graphical interface to do their work. We’re going to start with some simpler tools that will allow you to collect material on your topic from a few popular sites: later in the week, we’ll introduce more complex methods. We won’t begin to cover all the possible platforms and tools that you might need in your research going forward, but the more comfortable you get with the computational methods and tools we introduce, the easier it will be for you to pick up a new tool and bring it into your data collection process.

To that end, we’ve gathered a spreadsheet of social media data collection tools here that you can compare and consider as you figure out what you need to do your research. In the attached video, Dr. Anastasia Salter reviews three tools to get started.

After reviewing the above materials, participants should complete the Discussion 6 assignment.