Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preface -- How to think about digital research / Christian Sandvig and Eszter Hargittai -- "How local is user-generated content" : a 9,000+ word essay on answering a five-word research question" : or how we learned to stop worrying (or worry less) and love the diverse challenges of our fast-moving, geographically-flavored interdisciplinary research area / Darren Gergle and Brent Hecht -- Flash mobs and the social life of public spaces : analyzing online visual data to study new forms of sociability / Virag Molnar and Aron Hsiao -- Social software as social science / Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios -- Hired hands and dubious guesses : adventures in crowdsourced data collection / Aaron Shaw -- Making sense of teen life : strategies for capturing ethnographic data in a networked era / Danah Boyd -- When should we use real names in published accounts of internet research? / Amy Bruckman, Kurt Luther, and Casey Fiesler -- The art of web crawling for social science research / Michelle Shumate and Matthew Weber -- The ethnographic study of visual culture in the age of digitization / Paul Leonardi -- Read/write the digital archive: strategies for historical web research / Megan Sapnar Ankerson -- Big data, big problems, big opportunities : using internet log data to conduct social network analysis research / Brooke Foucault Welles -- Contributors -- References -- Index.

Restricted to subscribers or individual electronic text purchasers.

The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected. Digital Research Confidential offers scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers' mistakes -- and their successes. The book -- a follow-up to Eszter Hargittai's widely read Research Confidential -- presents behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stories of digital research projects, written by established and rising scholars. They discuss such challenges as archiving, Web crawling, crowdsourcing, and confidentiality. They do not shrink from specifics, describing such research hiccups as an ethnographic interview so emotionally draining that afterward the researcher retreated to a bathroom to cry, and the seemingly simple research question about Wikipedia that mushroomed into years of work on millions of data points. Digital Research Confidential will be an essential resource for scholars in every field. Contributors: Megan Sapnar Ankerson, Danah Boyd, Amy Bruckman, Casey Fiesler, Brooke Foucault Welles, Darren Gergle, Eric Gilbert, Eszter Hargittai, Brent Hecht, Aron Hsiao, Karrie Karahalios, Paul Leonardi, Kurt Luther [et al.]

Also available in print.

Mode of access: World Wide Web

Print version record.