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Tommaso Venturini and Richard Rogers offer a critical and conceptual introduction to digital methods. In a direct and accessible way, the authors provide hands-on advice to equip readers with the knowledge they need to understand which digital methods are best suited to their research goals and how to use them. Cutting through theoretical and technical complications, they focus on the different practices associated with digital methods to skilfully provide a quick-start guide to the art of querying, prompting, API calling, scraping, mining, wrangling, visualizing, crawling, plotting networks and scripting. While embracing the capacity of digital methods to rekindle sociological imagination, this book also delves into their limits and biases and reveals the hard labor of digital fieldwork. The book also touches upon the epistemic and political consequences of these methods, but with the purpose of providing practical advice for their usage. Digital Methods is a must-read for students and scholars of digital social research, media studies, critical data studies, digital humanities, computational social sciences, and for those who are interested in digital methods but do not know where to start.
List of contents
Acknowledgments1. Introduction
2. Sourcing Digital Inquiries
3. Querying and Triangulating
4. Prompting AI
5. Calling Platform APIs
6. Scraping Documents and Interfaces
7. Wrangling Digital Records
8. Mining Texts
9. Exploring through Visualizations
10. Crawling Connections
11. Analyzing Relational Landscapes
12. Tinkering with Scripts and Libraries
13. Conclusion
GlossaryReferences Index
About the author
Tommaso Venturini is Professor at the Medialab of the University of Geneva and researcher at the CNRS Centre for Internet and Society.
Richard Rogers is Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam.
