Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk is a comprehensive guide to analyzing digital interaction in formal and informal online spaces. The book establishes a new research framework for addressing major challenges that have arisen as social exchanges, meaning-making, and knowledge-building increasingly take place in social media, discussion forums, and online communities.
With a focus on methodological alignment to support valid and trustworthy knowledge claims, the authors present a series of design decisions to help researchers:
frame their object of interest and unpack underlying assumptions
understand key differences between researcher-influenced and pre-existing online talk
ethically extract and organize data for analysis
apply rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods to answer their research questions
Written for scholars in education, business, communication, media studies, health sciences, political sciences, and beyond, this is a thorough approach to the research methods and concerns essential to the study of talk in online contexts.