Abstract
In the 1990s, the term “online” research emerged as a new and vibrant suite of methods, focused on exploitation of sources not collected by traditional social science methods. Today, at least one part of the research life cycle is likely to be carried out “online,” from data collection through to publishing. In this article, we seek to understand emergent modes of doing and reporting qualitative research “online.” With a greater freedom now to term oneself a “researcher,” what opportunities and problems do working with online data sources bring? We explore implications of emerging requirements to submit supporting data for social science journal articles and question whether these demands might disrupt the very nature of and identity of qualitative research. Finally, we examine more recent forms of publishing and communicating research that support outputs where data play an integral role in elucidating context and enhancing the reading experience.
Highlights
This article sets out to provide some of the bigger picture issues and context around the Special Issue on “Digital Representations: Opportunities for Re-Using and Publishing Digital Qualitative Data.” As the title of our article suggests, it sets out some of the wonderful opportunities presented to the social scientist for working with digital online sources, yet considers how to deal with representing, citing and replicating these sources given the fragile world of the Internet
We examine how working with qualitative data “online” requires some differences in approach across the research life cycle
In Part 2, we look at the ontological status of doing research online and show opportunities that information on the Internet offers for extending the capacity of scientific knowledge through practices like citizen science
Summary
This article sets out to provide some of the bigger picture issues and context around the Special Issue on “Digital Representations: Opportunities for Re-Using and Publishing Digital Qualitative Data.” As the title of our article suggests, it sets out some of the wonderful opportunities presented to the social scientist for working with digital online sources, yet considers how to deal with representing, citing and replicating these sources given the fragile world of the Internet. Traditional elements of social scientific inquiry, like the concepts of reliability, replicability, and validity, and their more recent rendering in terms of trustworthiness, veracity, and so on, are subject to question and debate in a way that they are not in the domain of quantitative social science. We return to this issue in Part 3, noting that such critiques of these concepts long pre-date the current period, yet seem to re-emerge with a vigor or a crisis on a regular basis
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