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.

Note About This Syllabus

You should expect this syllabus to be a dynamic document and you will notice that there are a few places marked "To Be Determined." Although the core expectations for this class are fixed, the details of readings and assignments will shift. As a result, there are three important things to keep in mind:

Although details on this syllabus will change, I will not change readings or assignments less than one week before they are due. If I don't fill in a "To Be Determined" one week before it's due, it is dropped. If you plan to read more than one week ahead, contact me first.
Closely monitor your email or the announcements section on the course website on Canvas. When I make changes, these changes will be recorded in the history of this page so that you can track what has changed and I will summarize these changes in an announcement on Canvas that will be emailed to everybody in the class.
I will ask the class for voluntary anonymous feedback frequently — especially toward the beginning of the quarter. Please let me know what is working and what can be improved. In the past, I have made many adjustments based on this feedback.

Books

This book has no textbook and I am not requiring you to buy any books for this class. That said, several required readings and many suggested readings, will come from several excellent books which you should consider purchasing for your library.

These books include:

Rogers, R. (2013). Digital Methods. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Hesse-Biber, S. N. (Ed.). (2011). The Handbook of Emergent Technologies in Social Research (1st edition). New York: Oxford University Press.
Ackland, R. (2013). Web Social Science. SAGE Publications Ltd.