Digital Research Confidential is August book club pick
Thursday, 08/11/2016
At the August meeting of the UMSI Social Media Book Club, participants will discuss the first chapter of Christian Sandvig’s recent book Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online.
The chapter, co-authored with Sandvig’s co-editor Eszter Hargittai, explores “How to Think about Digital Research.”
On Wednesday, August 17, between 12 and 12:45 p.m., readers will have the opportunity to chat live with the author via Twitter.
Sandvig offers following advice for those interested in participating in the online event:
“First, read the free chapter. Next, tweet your questions or comments, before August 17, being sure to include the hashtag #UMSIBookClub. Then, on August 17, at noon (EDT), I will respond to these comments. If you’re online at the same time, feel free to interact with the author. If not, you can always search Twitter using #UMSIBookClub to read what happened.”
Since tweets are limited to 140 characters, Sandvig notes that “this is not like a regular book club. Keeping comments within the character limit can be quite a challenge!”
Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online, edited by Christian Sandvig and Eszter Hargittai, was published in December, 2015, by The MIT Press. The book 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, offering scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers’ mistakes—and their successes.
The first chapter, “How to Think About Digital Research, is available as a free download at umsi.info/august_read.
The book club launched this summer with Professor Kentaro Toyama’s book Geek Heresy, which was discussed online in two sessions, June 23 and July 21.
In this video Info-Minute, Christian Sandvig explains "What Facebook Is Not Showing You."
- UMSI News Service