Digital methods I: Wicked tensions

Abstract

In this first of three reports, I engage with ‘digital methods’ as methodologies or approaches to knowing and making sense of the world. Triangulation and representativeness are two sites of tension at which new opportunities for research opened up by digital mediums, mediations and data sources come up against epistemological limitations of methodologies for accessing and making sense of digital presences, practices, and spatialities. Triangulation signals the challenges of maximizing meaning in qualitative and mixed-methods digital research, whereas representativeness captures the challenges of using data-analytic approaches to say something meaningful about socio-spatial relations rather than about digital entities per se.