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 QUALITATIVE
RESEARCH IN DIGITAL
ENVIRONMENTS
A Research Toolkit

Alessandro Caliandro and

Alessandro Gandini

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 First published 2017
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2017 Taylor & Francis
The right of Alessandro Caliandro and Alessandro Gandini to be identified
as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
[CIP data]

ISBN: 978-1-138-18868-6 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-18869-3 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64216-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

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 CONTENTS

List of figures and tables vii

Acknowledgementsx

SECTION I
Introduction1

1 Digital data 8

2 Social media: Definitions and uses 33

3 Digital methods for qualitative research 51

4 Online social formations 76

SECTION II
Introduction119

5 Digital tools 130

6 Social network analysis 157

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 vi Contents

7 Content analysis 191

Conclusion 215

Index225

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on

SECTION I
INTRODUCTION

The overarching scope of Qualitative Research in Digital Environments: A Research

Toolkit is to provide researchers who want to study digital environments across a
variety of disciplines, from marketing to the social sciences and digital media, with
some basic concepts and techniques that can be used to detect, collect, organise,
analyse and interpret digital data. Specifically, the book is a theoretical and practical
toolkit for doing qualitative research on social media environments, such as blogs
and online forums, as well as social networking sites such as Twitter, Instagram,
Facebook and YouTube.
With this work, we aim to offer a pivotal resource for the study of cultural
practices and meanings across online social networks and platforms. Building on
the grounds of ‘digital methods’ and especially the principle of follow the medium
(Rogers, 2013), our approach aims to represent a valuable methodological guideline
that supports the understanding of complex socio-cultural contexts that are popu-
lated by dispersed, fluid and dynamic social formations – and to also be useful for
multidisciplinary purposes. Think about how important it is for marketing, digital
PR and advertising professionals to research and interpret the opinions and cultures
of their customers and target audiences online – for instance, as consumers/users
interact across Facebook pages, or flood Twitter feeds with opinions about a certain
product or brand. Imagine how important it is for anthropologists and sociologists
who study cultures and social dynamics to observe relevant aspects of our social and
cultural lives – such as political opinion, social movements or work – as many of
these phenomena today originate or develop across online spaces. This is a limited
but significant range of the many applications that digital media research can have.
Our contribution aims to be a complement to the various methodological
approaches that can be adopted to the study of a multidimensional context
that is approached from various, and sometimes very different, perspec­tives. In
this book we build on a unique range of case studies that illustrate the practical

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 2  Section I

applications of techniques and tools of data collection, analysis andinterpretation –

a set of resources that we used in our daily research practice at the Centre for
Digital Ethnography, based at the University of Milan. Case studies include work
on collaborative peer production, teen fandom, hipster cultures, consumer and
brand-oriented research, just to name a few. This wide variety of examples will
support the claim that a coherent methodological framework for the qualitative
study of online environments can be adopted fruitfully in many contexts, and
hopefully will come to represent an action plan on how to conduct research on
the digital realm from a qualitative point of view for fellow researchers in their
own fields.
We believe that a contribution like ours is much needed in the contempo-
rary landscape of digital research – which, in its current stage, is still arguably
a ‘science in the making’. Digital methods research is an exciting, growing and
incredibly lively field that involves a community of scholars from various dis-
ciplines who engage and debate, agree and disagree on how to deal with the
monstrous amount of data produced by the activity of users on the Internet,
how to engage with the astonishing insights and potential the Internet offers
for the study of its own functioning, and how to make sense of the social and
cultural principles that characterise online interaction. Yet, digital research is
also an eminently contradictory practice, one that challenges the usual dichot-
omy that separates qualitative and quantitative research (Goertz and Mahoney,
2012) as it employs a range of various, and sometimes incoherent, methodo-
logical principles – often, rushing to ‘get the data’ without really knowing why
or what to do with it.

Researching social media: the methodological debate

In order to see how challenging this distinction can be, we may start from a basic
epistemological difference. To put it extremely simply, it may be said that a quan-
titative approach tends to focus on so-called Big Data (boyd and Crawford, 2012).
Essentially, this consists in the collection and management of huge quantities of
digital information, using algorithms and dedicated software to automatically
analyse such data, and elaborate statistical models that enable the interpretation
of social phenomena and identification of underlying trends. Common research
questions that can be addressed via such quantitative, Big Data approaches are, for
instance: “To what extent can Twitter data predict political disaffection?” (Monti,
et al., 2013), or, “To what extent can Wikipedia articles about movies predict box-
office success? (Mestyan, Yasseri and Kertész, 2013), or, “To what extent can Ins-
tagram selfies account for the diffusion of narcissism in contemporary societies?”
(Tifentale and Manovich, 2015).
A qualitative approach, by contrast, tends to focus on ‘small data’, which may
be described as small-to-medium-sized sets of digital data, sometimes generated
by a single user (Veinot, 2007). The use of small data allows researchers to focus on
the socio-cultural meanings that digital media users assign to their actions and the

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 Introduction  3

content they produce, as well as on the practices and cultures of interactions among
users. Typically, a qualitative digital inquiry aims at describing and understanding
how users use digital data, devices and affordances to perform their self-presentation
strategies (Marwick, 2015) or how users participate in the co-construction of
socio-cultural formations such as online communities or publics (Bruns and Bur-
gess, 2015; Papacharissi, 2011) within a given context.
This book, as the title illustrates, focuses chiefly on the qualitative approach.
This is essentially due to two main reasons. A first and basic one is that we nor-
mally use a qualitative approach in our own empirical research projects; as such,
we have developed an epistemological and empirical set of principles that we have
widely experimented with and rehearsed. Second, and most importantly, we think
that the adoption of a qualitative approach focused on small data is more viable
and simpler for beginners to use when approaching digital research. Small data,
in general terms, are normally easier to collect and handle, but nevertheless can
offer equally insightful results as those obtained using Big Data research, depend-
ing on the specific research question. As with the usual methodological traditions
of qualitative and quantitative research in the social sciences, the adoption of these
approaches to digital research can lead to meaningfully different, but also comple-
mentary results.
However, the distinction between Big Data and small data, and between quali-
tative and quantitative methods, in digital research is a challenging one. In fact,
these categories must be taken as conventional and merely analytical constructs.
We maintain that these terms are conceptual artefacts that we use here simply
to enable the reader to better understand the qualitative approach proposed in
this book. Within emerging research sub-fields such as Digital Sociology, Digital
Humanities and Digital Research Methods, it is often difficult to neatly distinguish
between ‘big’ and ‘small’ data, or to employ strictly quantitative or qualitative meth-
ods. From an empirical point of view, these two dimensions effectively prove to be
deeply intertwined – and increasingly will be. Often, for instance, the adoption of
an analytical focus that makes use of small data comes as a result of processing Big
Data sampling. Similarly, Big Data analysis often takes advantage of small samples of
data, upon which human analysts perform manual tasks with the purpose of pre-
liminarily exploring huge datasets and making sense of them (Ford, 2014). Finally,
both big and small data analysis often deals with digital text broadly considered,
such as Instagram photos or Twitter messages. This kind of ‘measurable content’
has an intimately hybrid nature, such that it proves difficult to classify the unit of
analysis in a way that it clearly resolves into a quantitative or qualitative approach.
For instance, think about the uses of hashtags on Twitter; these can be submitted
to quantitative content analysis by counting frequencies or co-occurrences, but at
the same time they may constitute the unit of analysis for a qualitative study that
points at the identification of a collective cultural discourse that could be mapped,
navigated and submitted to qualitative content analysis (Marres and Gerlitz, 2015).
What makes the difference is the epistemological principle, and the question or
topic the researcher is investigating.

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 4  Section I

Digital methods for cultural processes

In order to provide the reader with a toolkit to conduct qualitative research in
digital environments, we build on the Digital Methods paradigm (Rogers, 2013;
see Chapter 3). This paradigm is taken here as the main interpretative framework
for investigating the structure of social media environments and understanding
the cultural processes that arise within them. These ‘cultural processes’ comprise
the set of interactions between users and digital devices, and among users them-
selves, whereby shared systems of symbols, values, opinions, points of view and
identities are brought into existence (Hallinan and Striphas, 2014). Specifically,
we will use Digital Methods in conjunction with a qualitative and interpreta-
tive framework, and show how this approach could be effectively applied to
the study of crucial phenomena within contemporary digital society, such as
consumer cultures, fan cultures, political cultures, digital work and peer-to-peer
production.
To this purpose, the wide range of case studies that derive from our everyday
activities as social researchers, as well as from our experience as marketing consult-
ants, will be used to showcase practical applications of how online users interact
with, and manipulate, digital devices and environments, to produce what we will
identify as ‘shared cultural imaginaries’, within which specific strategies of self-
presentation and specific types of social formations can be found. In so doing, this
book is designed to be a particularly useful resource for qualitative researchers
interested in consumer culture and media studies in a broad sense, such as sociolo-
gists, anthropologists, marketing scholars and practitioners engaged in professional
research work. All of them have to cope with social media environments when
conducting their research projects, increasingly needing to analyse digital-based
data sources from a qualitative perspective.
Take ethnographers, for example: in our contemporary societies, marked by high
geographical mobility, ethnographers are more and more pushed to perform what
is known as multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995); that is, to follow participants
across their movements in space. As a result, it is likely that ethnographers come
across digital environments and social media in particular, since social actors nowa-
days spend a significant part of their everyday life within them.That is exactly what
occurred to us while working on a project that required us to ethnographically
explore a number of peer-to-peer communities located in different cities across
Europe.1 As we designed the research strategy for the project, we quickly realised
that it was almost impossible to simply conduct a standard ethnographic inquiry
within these communities, given that their members do not share a privileged and
fixed site or field in their convening and interacting practices. Actually, thanks to
preliminary explorations we observed how members of these communities con-
tinually shifted from physical environments (such as official headquarters and public
events) to digital environments (such as virtual communities situated on internal
mailing lists or social media platform like blogs, Twitter and Facebook) – and vice
versa. Therefore, we had no choice but to equip ourselves with a methodological

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 Introduction  5

strategy that could allow us to follow our participants across both offline and online
environments.
Given the complexity of the relationships between the offline and online field
in contemporary research, and the continuous shifting that takes place between
these environments, ethnographers are required to treat the digital environment
in a much more dynamic way. They could approach it, for instance, as a point of
departure and of arrival for their inquiries (Hine, 2015), or as a field for the study
of both the socio-cultural contexts where social actors live and the specific activi-
ties they engage in, which are shaped and affected by such contexts (Marwick,
2013; Marwick and boyd, 2011). This applies to a variety of topics. If, for example,
an ethnographer wants to study the phenomenon of teenage fandom for the band
One Direction, as one of the authors did (Arvidsson, et al., 2015), s/he can easily
and fruitfully use a digital environment such as Twitter as the main field site. This
stands out as a privileged context for a) the identification of influential members in
the public, who can then be interviewed offline, in order to delve into the study of
micro-celebrity practice; b) the analysis of the personal profile of participants that
s/he has encountered offline; c) the broad reconstruction of the online social context
that characterises the fan culture of One Direction (that is, the cultural context in
which teens operate) and the online everyday activities that some of them perform;
and d) eventually, the analysis of the personal profiles of One Direction members.
Notwithstanding whether the researcher is an ethnographer, whether s/he con-
siders the Internet as a point of departure or arrival for her/his inquiries, or treats
digital environments as privileged sites for the study of socio-cultural contexts or
cultural practices of specific social actors, all these research tasks need an appropri-
ate qualitative framework that allows the researcher to systematically and rationally
manage, analyse and interpret digital data, devices and affordances. It is for this
peculiar reason that we believe the Digital Methods paradigm (Rogers, 2013) is the
most useful approach to draw on for this purpose. This paradigm takes the nature
and affordances of the digital environment under serious enquiry, since its main
purpose is to ‘follow’ how digital devices such as links, search engines or social
media platforms, and functions such as Twitter’s hashtags and retweets structure the
flows of communication and interaction among users on the Internet. The Digital
Methods framework invites researchers to approach the Internet as a source of new
methods and languages for the understanding of our contemporary society, rather
than a mere object of study or a field in which to merely adapt classical research
techniques such as surveys, interviews or focus groups (Fielding, Lee and Blank,
2008).

The structure of this book

In this book we will provide the reader with the necessary epistemological and
theoretical premises – as well as with the practical, hands-on guidance – to collect,
analyse and interpret digital data qualitatively, from a variety of sources. To do so,
we have devised a structure that reflects this combination. In Section I we take the

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 6  Section I

reader through a set of chapters that aim at providing an understanding of the unit
and field of analysis. Chapter 1 addresses the key concepts of digital data, digital
devices and affordances. It unpacks the meaning of these concepts and illustrates
their relevance as a necessary premise to the management of a qualitative research
project across digital environments. These concepts are crucial in the economy of
this book, for three fundamental reasons. First, they constitute the backbone of the
Internet and social media. Second, they represent the basic empirical units the digital
researcher has to cope with. Finally, they represent those natively digital objects that
the Digital Methods framework normally starts from in order to comply with the
theoretical foundation of their approach, that is to follow the medium (Rogers, 2009).
Chapter 2 focuses on the fundamental environments that our toolkit makes possible
to observe: social media. We discuss the main characteristics of these environments
and the main affordances that characterise each social media platform that we need
to take into consideration in our methodological inquiry. In Chapter 3 we dis-
cuss the Digital Methods paradigm in juxtaposition with alternative approaches and
show how we have come to adapt this to the qualitative study of cultural processes.
Section I ends with Chapter 4, which unpacks the main social formations that can
be found in digital environments – and which are at the core of the qualitative
enquiry – and illustrates the practical applications of their study, to showcase how
insightful the study of online environments from a qualitative perspective can be.
After a brief Introduction that sets the tone for what is the more practical side
of this book, Section II provides readers with the actual toolkit to undertake quali-
tative research across online spaces that is at the heart of this book. Chapter 5
illustrates the main free-to-use digital tools that can be utilised to extract data from
social media. Chapter 6 deals with the analysis of the network formations that
pertain to online social environments, illustrating the uses and applications of social
network analysis and network visualisation for digital research. Finally, Chapter 7
deals with the uses and applications of qualitative content analysis to digital text,
specifically focusing on the basic practice that can be repurposed for the mapping
of the cultural imaginaries that emerge from digital environments. The Conclusion
reflects on the toolkit by looking at how this can contribute in various ways to
specific disciplines, from marketing to Digital Sociology, and recaps the main prin-
ciples of the approach here proposed, with a view towards inputting new research
on this topic.

Note
1 The EU-FP7–funded research project P2Pvalue looks at value creation across contexts
of commons-based peer production (CBPP) and aims at building a techno-social plat-
form for the support of collaborative work. See the P2Pvalue website (http://www.
p2pvalue.eu/) for detailed information.

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 Introduction  7

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