Researching Digital Life

We now live in a world where all aspects of everyday life are thoroughly mediated by digital technologies. Making sense of digital life is accordingly an essential undertaking for social science and humanities scholars. This multidisciplinary book provides an essential guide to researching digital life: Orienting readers with respect to methodologies, research design, and research ethics. Detailing key research methods, including interviews, surveys, ethnographies, walking methodologies, arts-based and participatory approaches, historical analysis, data visualisation, mapping and data analytics. Demonstrating these methods in action in real-world studies that have investigated apps and interfaces, social and locative media, mobilities, smart cities, and digital labour and work. The authors provide: • Non-Eurocentric perspectives and case studies from diverse disciplines • Annotated further reading to help you situate your research alongside existing research in your field • An outline of future directions for researching digital life. Accessible in style and richly illustrated, the chapters provide a wealth of key insights and practical information to ensure research projects are successfully planned and implemented.

We live in an increasingly digitised society. In an age of digital identities, rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence and ever more sophisticated software available, our methods for researching digital media must be flexible and adaptable. This book will help you to understand why researchers in this field choose and use particular research methods, equipping you to put these methods into practice across the whole range of undergraduate media courses. This book shows you how research methods can help us to make sense of the myriad of information we encounter online every day, from Tiktok influencers to viral Twitter posts. Complete with case studies in each chapter, the book covers both well-established methods, such as network analysis, and cutting-edge ones, such as interface analysis. It provides a crucial foundation for research in digital media, demonstrating the scope and potential of these tools. The book adopts an easy-to-navigate structure, taking you through specific methods in a systematic way. It shows you examples of classic uses of each method, and directs you towards further resources after each chapter.

Digital technologies loom large in the experience of today’s students. However, parents, teachers, and school leaders have only started to take stock of the ramifications for teaching, learning, and faith. Based on a three-year in-depth study of Christian schools, Digital Life Together walks educators, school leaders, and parents through some of the big ideas that are hidden in our technology habits, going beyond general arguments for or against digital devices to address the nuanced realities of Christian education in a twenty-first-century context.

This provocative new introduction to the field of digital sociology offers a critical overview of interdisciplinary debates about new ways of knowing society that are emerging today at the interface of computing, media, social research and social life. Digital Sociology introduces key concepts, methods and understandings that currently inform the development of specifically digital forms of social enquiry. Marres assesses the relevance and usefulness of digital methods, data and techniques for the study of sociological phenomena and evaluates the major claim that computation makes possible a new ‘science of society’. As Marres argues, the digital does much more than inspire innovation in social research: it forces us to engage anew with fundamental sociological questions. We must learn to appreciate that the digital has the capacity to throw into crisis existing knowledge frameworks and is likely to reconfigure wider relations. This timely engagement with a key transformation of our age will be indispensable reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking courses in digital sociology, digital media, computing and society.

`This new edition of this excellent guide maintains the standard of the original whilst taking full account of developments in both methodological discussion and the techniques of social research. The organization of the text around the research process is a great strength of the text' - David Byrne, University of Durham Preview the Third Edition's opening chapter and guide to its teaching and learning features designed to stimulate student engagement with the content here The Third Edition of Nigel Gilbert's hugely successful Researching Social Life covers the whole range of methods from quantitative to qualitative in a down-to-earth and unthreatening manner. Gilbert's text offers the best coverage of the full scope of research methods of any of the leading textbooks in the field, making this an essential text for any student starting a research methods course or doing a research project. This thoroughly revised text is driven by the expertise of a writing team comprised of internationally-renowned experts in the field. New to the Third Edition are chapters on: - Searching and Reviewing the Literature - Refining the Question - Grounded Theory and Inductive Research - Mixed Methods - Participatory Action Research - Virtual Methods - Narrative Analysis A number of useful features, such as worked examples, case studies, discussion questions, project ideas and checklists are included throughout the book to help those new to research to engage with the material. Researching Social Life follows the 'life cycle' of a typical research project, from initial conception through to eventual publication. Its breadth and depth of coverage make this an indispensable must-have textbook for students on social research methods courses in any discipline.

Digital technologies, digital media, and mobile technologies now shape the experience of everyday life in the Western world, yet the way our quotidian lives are enmeshed with these technologies is far from clearly understood. Through studies of the digital everyday, sociologists are beginning to reinvigorate the sociological imagination in light of digitization. Chapters in this Byte cover topics such as designing a research framework and how to work ethically as a digital researcher, continually interrogating one’s position as a researcher and reflecting on the process of knowledge creation. Cumulatively, they highlight the value of sociological theory for understanding our digital world.

Research on and with digital technologies is everywhere today. This timely, authoritative Handbook explores the issues of rapid technological development, social change, and the ubiquity of computing technologies which have become an integrated part of people′s everyday lives. This is a comprehensive, up-to-date resource for the twenty-first century. It addresses the key aspects of research within the digital technology field and provides a clear framework for readers wanting to navigate the changeable currents of digital innovation. Main themes include: - Introduction to the field of contemporary digital technology research - New digital technologies: key characteristics and considerations - Research perspectives for digital technologies: theory and analysis - Environments and tools for digital research - Research challenges Aimed at a social science audience, it will be of particular value for postgraduate students, researchers and academics interested in research on digital technology, or using digital technology to undertake research.

"In the decades it takes to bring up a child, parents face challenges that are both helped and hindered by the fact that they are living through a period of unprecedented digital innovation. Drawing on extensive research with diverse parents, this book reveals how digital technologies give personal and political parenting struggles a distinctive character, as parents determine how to forge new territory with little precedent, or support. The book reveals the pincer movement of parenting in late modernity. Parents are both more burdened with responsibilities and charged with respecting the agency of their child-leaving much to negotiate in today's "democratic" families. The book charts how parents now often enact authority and values through digital technologies-as "screen time," games, or social media become ways of both being together and setting boundaries. The authors show how digital technologies introduce both valued opportunities and new sources of risk. To light their way, parents comb through the hazy memories of their own childhoods and look toward varied imagined futures. This results in deeply diverse parenting in the present, as parents move between embracing, resisting, or balancing the role of technology in their own and their children's lives. This book moves beyond the panicky headlines to offer a deeply researched exploration of what it means to parent in a period of significant social and technological change. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative research in the United Kingdom, the book offers conclusions and insights relevant to parents, policymakers, educators, and researchers everywhere"--