Internet Research Methods (Spring 2016)

Designing Internet Research

COM528 - Department of Communication, University of Washington

Instructor: Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)

Course Websites:

• We will use Canvas for announcements, turning in assignments, and discussion
• Everything else will be linked on this page.

Course Catalog Description:

Focuses on designing Internet research, assessing the adaptation of proven methods to Internet tools and environments, and developing new methods in view of particular capacities and characteristics of Internet applications. Legal and ethical aspects of Internet research receive ongoing consideration.

Overview and Learning Objectives

What new lines of inquiry and approaches to social research are made possible and necessary by the Internet? In what ways have established research methods been affected by the Internet? How does the Internet challenge established methods of social research? How are researchers responding to these challenges?

These are some of the key questions we will explore in this course. The course will focus on assessing the incorporation of Internet tools in established and emergent methods of social research, the adaptation of social research methods to study online phenomena, and the development of new methods and tools that correspond with the particular capacities and characteristics of the Internet. The readings will include both descriptions of Internet-related research methods with an eye to introducing skills and examples of studies that use them.The legal and ethical aspects of Internet research will receive ongoing consideration throughout the course. The purpose of this course is to help prepare students to design high quality research projects that use the Internet to study online communicative, social, cultural, and political phenomena.

I will consider the course a complete success if every student is able to do all of these things at the end of the quarter:

• Discuss and compare distinct types of Internet research including: web archiving; textual analysis; ethnography; interviews; network analyses of social and hyperlink networks; analysis of digital trace data, traditional, natural, and field experiments; design research; interviewing; survey research; and narrative and visual analyses.
• Describe particular challenges and threats to research validity associated with each method.
• For at least one method, be able to provide a detailed description of a research project and feel comfortable embarking on a formative study using this methodology.
• Given a manuscript (e.g., in the context of a request for peer review), be able to evaluate a Internet-based study in terms of its use its methodological choices.
• Use a modern programming language (e.g., Python) to collect a dataset from a web API like the APIs from Twitter and Wikipedia.