IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - June 2018 - 7
Book Reviews
Michael L. Black
Digital Research Confidential
Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online.
By Eszter Hargittai and Christian Sandvig. M.I.T. Press, 2015.
nterest from academics in the humanities
and social sciences
in studying the cultural dimensions of
computing can be traced back at
least as far as the early 1980s. As
personal computers became increasingly common in homes, offices,
schools, and universities, scholars
like Jay David Bolter, Lucy Suchmann, and Sherry Turkle began
the work of adapting the research
methodologies of their respective
disciplines to study computing in
these new contexts. Personal computing devices and the myriad of
cultural activities we juggle through
them have since become more and
more complicated; however, at the
same time user-friendly approaches to design encourage us to take
this complexity for granted. Indeed,
as Eszter Hargittai and Christian
Sandvig note in their introduction
to Digital Research Confidential:
The Secrets of Studying Behavior
Online, there is now often little institutional reward for writing about
how the broad integration of computing affects academic research
about culture and behavior. In this
respect, their collection serves as
an effective argument for the value
of sustaining in-depth conversations
on the effects that constantly changing technological conditions have
on research methods. It is also an
engaging introduction to the wide
ra nge of research in these fields
being conducted digitally.
Not to be confused with the "digital humanities" - a field largely
devoted to studying and preserving
pre-twentieth century texts due to
the copyright's influence over digitization efforts - the "digital media
studies" represented in Hargittai and
Sandvig's collection focuses on contemporary and often digitally created
cultural activities. This interdisciplinary research area involves scholars
from a variety of disciplines including, but not limited to, literature and
language, writing studies, history,
anthropology, sociology, communications, information science, and
computer science. Representing
every methodological approach in
this incredibly diverse field in a single volume would be an impossible
task. Hargittai and Sandvig have wisely chosen to limit their collection by
focusing primarily on scholars whose
work involves Web 2.0 technologies.
This decision gives each of the essays
in the book some common ground
while still allowing the collection to
highlight the breadth of subjects covered by digital media studies. The
collection discusses projects involving the Internet Archive's Wayback
Machine, YouTube, Twitter, computer-aided drafting software, Amazon's
Mechanical Turk system, Wikipedia,
Flickr, homemade webcrawlers, and
Second Life.
Hargittai and Sandvig's excellent
introduction is able to synthesize
I
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2018.2839218
Date of publication: 31 May 2018
june 2018
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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine
the wide-ranging research trends in
this field around a tension between
digital media as instrumentation
and digital media as object of study.
Digital research in the humanities
and social sciences is often framed
in one of two ways: either online
platforms that offer "a new kind of
microscope" allowing us to understand an area of offline behavior
we are already familiar with in a new
way, or online social activity sharing
enough similarities to offline behavior that we can comfortably transfer
our existing assumptions about
how humans relate to one another
into these new contexts. Both of
these approaches assume that theory
and method can be discussed separately. Most research leveraging these
approaches, in other words, assumes
either that digital tools add to - but
don't disrupt our - core understandings of cultural and behavior or that
online activities function as relatively
seamless extensions of offline behavior. Yet as Megan Sapnar Ankerson
concludes in her essay, each project
in the collection involves a moment
when a researcher "could not help
but notice the ways [their] entire
engagement with [their] project was
thoroughly organized through software" (p. 47). While the widespread
acceptance of particular methods
in the humanities and social sciences
allows for basic assumptions about
culture and society shaping them to
be taken for granted, digital tools
are often designed with other needs
in mind. Conducting social research
7
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