Digital Methods for Web Research

Digital methods are techniques for the study of societal change and cultural condi- tion with online data. They make use of available digital objects such as the hyperlink, tag, timestamp, like, share, retweet, and seek to learn from how the objects are treated by the methods built into the dominant devices online, such as Google Web Search and Facebook’s Graph Search. They endeavor to repurpose the online methods and services with a social research outlook. Ultimately the question is the location of the baseline, and whether the ndings made may be grounded online. Digital methods as a research practice is part of the computational turn in the humanities and social sciences, and as such may be situated alongside other recent approaches, such as cul- tural analytics, culturomics, and virtual methods, where distinctions may be made about the types of data employed (natively digital and digitized) as well as method (written for the medium, or migrated to it). The limitations of digital methods are also treated. Digital methods recognize the problems with web data, such as the imperma- nence of web services, and the instability of data streams, where, for example, APIs (application programming interfaces) are recon gured or discontinued. They also grapple with the quality of web data, and the challenges of longitudinal study, where, for instance, all of Twitter’s tweets may be archived by the Library of Congress, but new types of gaps emerge owing to changes over the years in the company’s terms of service