I've been refraining from commenting on Egypt here, on the basis that I don't know anything about Egypt, and that my main opinion - that an Egyptian democracy would be better than an Egyptian dictatorship - doesn't add much to the discourse.
Yesterday, watching the BBC's piece about the role of the internet in the protests, I was struck by how vast and diffuse the body of data is. Anyone who wants to write a history of the 25th January movement is going to have to get to grips with Facebook pages, Twitter posts, mobile-phone videos spread across a number of different sites. And that's without even factoring the ephemerality of those sources in. Somewhere in academia, someone must surely have begun working on research methodologies for the online age: I'd be really interested to see them.
3 comments:
And how to reference it all properly! Y
Hi,
I can't make any claims about whether this is 'best practice', and I haven't done comparative studies or anything rigorous like that, but I can let you know how I work on this sort of material.
I use web searches (using a variety of tools to try to avoid any bias from search provider, and using tools which search on similarity not just keywords) to find a number of seed sites. I then run web-crawls from those seeds to find a broad range of online resources. For some sites I have typically used their specific search facilities as there is often data which is hidden from public search engines. Inspecting the information that this returns often suggests new searches to try as well, so this is an iterative process (and generates a lot of data which needs to be processed).
In terms of analysis, I generally use a form of thematic analysis to draw out the core themes (essentially keyword analysis, but with contextual clues for mood and, importantly, with an awareness for sarcasm!). Depending on what the research is about, this feeds in to some form of synthesis of either a system description or the development of grounded theory.
The whole thing is part of an iterative process, with the insights from the analysis leading to refinement or addition of search terms.
Hope that helps!
Thanks for posting that, it's really interesting to see an approach to researching new media sources.
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