ABSTRACT
As illustrated in the Introduction, this book is grounded upon a qualitative approach to digital methods. But what are digital methods? Digital methods employ “online tools and data for the purposes of social and medium research” (Rogers, 2017, p. 75), with the broader scope of studying socio-cultural conditions and changes (Rogers, 2013). More than a set of digital techniques, digital methods are, first and foremost, an epistemological paradigm. In fact, digital methods rest on the premise that digital environments (such as blogs, search engines, and, of course, platforms) can be considered as sources of methods, rather than just objects of study (Rogers, 2009). To fully take advantage of such a new and invaluable repository of methods, researchers must learn how to follow the medium, meaning, to make use of and take inspiration from those natively digital methods that digital environments apply to themselves to gather, order, organise, rank and, rate digital data – as with APIs, algorithms, tags, retweets, likes, hashtags, etc. (Caliandro, 2014) – (for instance, retweets are devices through which users establish new social relations as well as, at the same time, the very natively digital metrics through which one can measure such relations) (Ruppert et al., 2013). Specifically, by following the medium, digital methods aim at understanding how digital infrastructures structure communication and interaction playing out on digital media; in so doing, they are primarily concerned with mapping online discourses and social formations (Marres, 2017).
