ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses to believe in the value of multi-method approaches for analysing the language used in social media contexts. It focuses on the principles and practices for collecting data that would be used when a research project includes a quantitative element, while the discourse analytic and ethnographic approaches covered in, and most readily align with qualitative aspects of the research design. The chapter covers two well-known tools for eliciting quantitative data and close by considering the factors which are important for designing and gathering material for a social media corpus. It explains the tools used to elicit data for a quantitative project, to some of the technical processes involved in gathering existing texts that can be used for a particular subfield of language study: corpus linguistics. The process of selecting a particular text type and compiling a corpus for analysis is described in Andrew Kehoe's case study of building the Birmingham Blog Corpus.
