Qualitative Research and Hypermedia

Digital culture and digital technologies have rapidly become unavoidable and essential forms of social experience and communication in our emerging globalised society. If we want to attempt to analyse and understand our technology-saturated society, and all its new media, then we must also develop research methods and forms of analysis that can accommodate and exploit digital culture and digital technologies.

This important new methods text sets out to equip qualitative researchers with the tools necessary to conduct ethnography in the age of email and the internet. It will investigate how digital technologies potentially transform the ways in which we do research. This text also introduces the reader to new emerging methods that utilise new technologies and explains how to conduct data collection, analysis and representation using new technologies and `hypermedia'.

Essential reading for any student or researcher interested in qualitative research in an age of hypermedia, this text:

• explains how digital technology impacts on social research;

• investigates how digital technology has reshaped the field of social research;

• consider the implications of bringing multimedia into the forefront of qualitative research;

• suggests new ways of observing and documenting a `technologised' and design-rich society;

• enables the reader to use new technologies to handle and represent qualitative data;

  • unpacks the theoretical implications of writing and researching for the electronic screen

Auteur

Bella Dicks is a sociologist specialising in qualitative methodology and ethnography, with a focus on digital and multimodal methods. She edited the four-volume Digital Qualitative Research Methods for the SAGE Benchmarks in Social Research Methods series (2012). Her other major research interests are in heritage, museum studies, cultural memory, class and cultural policy.

Contenu
Introduction
Qualitative Research for the Digital World
Hypertext, Hypermedia and Qualitative Methods
Ethnographic Paradigms
Technologies and Representations
Hypertext Roots/Routes
Multi-Semiotic Ethnography
The Hypermedia Toolbox
Hypermedia Fieldwork
Hypermedia Data Analysis
Hypermedia Representation