Digital Methods: A Short Introduction

Tommaso Venturini and Richard Rogers offer a critical and conceptual introduction to digital methods. In a direct and accessible way, the authors provide hands-on advice to equip readers with the knowledge they need to understand which digital methods are best suited to their research goals and how to use them. Cutting through theoretical and technical complications, they focus on the different practices associated with digital methods to skillfully provide a quick-start guide to the art of querying, prompting, API calling, scraping, mining, wrangling, visualizing, crawling, plotting networks, and scripting. While embracing the capacity of digital methods to rekindle sociological imagination, this book also delves into their limits and biases and reveals the hard labor of digital fieldwork. The book also touches upon the epistemic and political consequences of these methods, but with the purpose of providing practical advice for their usage. Digital Methods is a must-read for students and scholars of digital social research, media studies, critical data studies, digital humanities, computational social sciences, and for those who are interested in digital methods but do not know where to start.