Big Data?: Qualitative Approaches to Digital Research

The advent of digital and 'big' data bout almost all aspects of social life presents several challenges to the nature and conduct of qualitative research. The digitization of many aspects of society creates new objects and subjects of research, but also potentially novel ways of knowing about social stability and change. The benefits of big data and digital research more broadly are heralded across many disciplines and domains. But there is legitimate uncertainty and a need for specificity in terms of just how transformative digital data and techniques are for the ways that qualitative research as actually conducted, analyzed and presented. What are the emerging relationships between established methodological frameworks and novel digital techniques? How do researchers both analyes and utilize digital data in the field? Are there new ways of knowing emerging with digital devices and data? In what ways are digital methods performative? What can people's uses of digital data tell us about society? How do researchers contextualize and situate digital data methodologically? This collection is orientated around qualitative approaches to what we have called 'digital social research'. This encompasses a wide range of perspectives, disciplines, conceptual and methodological orientations, and empirical research, all of which attests to the mainstreaming and diversification of digital technologies and data in social life today. It draws upon and international field of scholars conducting research that encompasses different concepts, elements, tools and practices of digital research. The volume offers critical insight into the questions being asked of new kinds of data, platforms and media, their implications for the future and how best can we actively conduct research in relation to these. It asks new questions concerning the familiar objects of qualitative research into digital media, a range of new data objects that challenges existing methods, situates digital data within a number of diverse fields and practices, and explores digital research in terms of key categories of social scientific inquiry. In so doing, the volume captures the significance of digital data in its many forms for the conduct of qualitative research and, most importantly, recognizes and engages with its diversity and ambivalence.