Researching YouTube

‘Researching YouTube’ introduces the special issue of Convergence which arose out of an international academic conference on YouTube that was held in London at Middlesex University in September 2016. The conference aimed to generate a robust overview of YouTube’s changing character and significance after its first ten years of development by creating a productive dialogue between speakers from different disciplines and cultures, and between YouTube-specific research and wider debates in media and social research on identity, aesthetics, politics, celebrity, production practices, business models, and research methods in digital culture. This introduction is structured around four themes that help to contextualise the papers that were selected from the many submitted for inclusion in the special issue and offers a substantial overview of the field of research: Participatory Culture and User-Generated Content; YouTube as a Hybrid Commercial Space; Vlogging and YouTube Celebrity; The ‘Mystery’ of the Algorithm and Digital Methods of Research