Annette N. Markham, Nancy K. Baym (opens in new tab)
Internet Inquiry: Conversations About Method takes students into the minds of top internet researchers as they discuss how they have worked through critical challenges as they research online social environments. Good research choices are not random but are deliberate, studied, and internally consistent. Rather than providing single «how to» answers, this book presents distinctive and divergent viewpoints on how to think about and conduct qualitative internet studies.
This collection of dialogues is the only textbook of its kind. It presents each chapter in the form of a question in order to provoke explicit consideration of key issues. It illustrates choices made within larger disciplinary contexts to help students blend approaches, think broadly, and conduct internet research with the benefit of multiplicity. It offers a range of perspectives in each chapter to vividly demonstrate that there are many ways to answer methodological challenges well. It includes contributors from multiple disciplines and across the globe. And it provides a highly reflexive writing style that allows readers to see processes that are rarely visible in finished research reports.