Abstract
As multiple forms of digital communication have become an increasingly indispensable part of human interactions, there has also been a proliferation of different methodologies in this field, including through the use of discourse-analytic examinations of digital phenomena. This edited volume thus places itself right on the practical side of the research process and draws upon contributions from a team of distinguished experts to ‘address some of the most pressing questions, issues, and challenges faced by digital discourse scholars today’ (p. 2).
This book consists of a neat introduction (Chapter 1) and a total of 13 substantive chapters, which can be divided into two theme-based sessions. The first half (Chapters 2–7) concerns the general and universal aspect of methodological considerations and each chapter reflects a certain phase of research, such as ‘how to apply theory to data, how to operationalize theoretical constructs, how to sample data, how to collect, store, and manage their data, how to engage in ethical research practices, and if/how to use software to support data analytic activities’ (p. 9). By comparison, the second half (Chapters 8–14) addresses some more specific aspects of research topics when approaching digital discourse analysis, including ‘how to work with multilingual data or multimodal datasets, as well as popular approaches to discourse-analytic research, such as corpus linguistics and ethnographic methods’ (p. 10). This book is also well-organized in its structure. Although each chapter significantly differs in terms of its topic, they all follow a similar outline: a brief orientation to the research topic, an integrative review of previous work on this topic, a more in-depth case study with specific comments and reflections about the authors’ methodological decision-making, and an ending part of practical guidance and helpful suggestions for further explorations. Chapter 1 not only presents a brief introduction about the motivation, purpose, and organization of this volume but also provides some background knowledge of discourse analysis, issues unique to digital discourse analysis, and prior research on digital discourse analysis for readers to more fully understand the subsequent contents.
Alla Tovares, in Chapter 2, opens the discussion about the role of theoretical constructs in digital discourse analysis. As research is seen as a coevolving process from describing to interpreting data, digital discourse analysts should ground their work in theory, which serves as a map to direct us to a dialogue with previous literature on the topic. To advance the scholarly conversation in some way, theoretical concepts carry huge weight ‘not only as their explanatory functions but also as connecting mechanisms between your work and that of other scholars’ (p. 22). However, it is also worth pointing out that overreliance on theory can lead to premature or overarching generalization and/or simplification departing from the provisional, data-driven, and interpretive paradigm of digital discourse and communication studies. The author then presents her own research project on political trolling in a Ukrainian online context and utilizes Bakhtin's Carnival Theory to demonstrate how theory can facilitate the researcher's understanding of certain digital practices. A “Theory Checklist” is also provided at the end and can act as a useful guide at the initial stage of research. In Chapter 3, Scott F. Kiesling further discusses how to operationalize the seemingly self-evident theoretical constructs in digital space by describing his process of conceptualizing stance and stance taking when examining threads on Reddit. He highlights the importance of both a precise theoretical definition and a recursive operational definition of the construct. Put differently, digital discourse researchers need to refine and iterate the definitions under certain highly contextualized digital settings.
Data preparation is another key consideration when researchers analyze digital discourse. They may feel constrained when deciding which types of data to collect and how much data to collect from online contexts because of the ubiquity and accessibility of data available online. Chapter 4 illustrates how to solve this. Stephen Pihlaja shares his study of religious discourse across social media platforms (YouTube, podcasts) to highlight that an appropriate sample of data is reached by accounting for both the sample quality (i.e., in terms of representativeness and significance) and the sample size. Moreover, digital discourse analysts can benefit from not only big data analytical approaches but fine-grained examinations of a handful of smaller data excerpts. However, the fluid and dynamic nature of digital discourse also makes it challenging to collect, manage, and restore. This results from the issues of ‘the temporality of data, platform-specific constraints on data retrieval, as well as privacy and anonymity’ (p. 74). Ramona Kreis, in Chapter 5, focuses on the process of data collection on Twitter and systematically reviews the automated tools and procedures employed by other scholars before, including web scrapers or crawlers (e.g., Python and R) and third-party tools (e.g., Twitter API and Twitter4J). For smaller data sets, they ‘can also be retrieved by directly saving or downloading the search results from the web page’ (p. 80). In her case study of right-wing discourses and counter-discourses on Twitter during the European migrant crisis, she emphatically shows us what to reflect on before we collect, including the relevance and adequacy of data to research questions, the applicability of related tools, the existence of metadata, and the rationality of database management.
Unavoidably, discourse and digital communication researchers are always faced with many thorny issues related to research ethics. Caroline Tagg and Tereza Spilioti (Chapter 6) highlight the need for researchers to cultivate ethical literacy, which ‘requires them to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their practices throughout the duration of any research project’ (p. 12). In Chapter 7, the author, Trena M. Paulus, tends to showcase the effectiveness of qualitative data analysis software (QDAS) for the workflow of digital discourse analysis, such as NVivo, MAXQDA, ATLAS.ti, and Dedoose. Specifically, she introduces how to use ATLAS.ti QDAS to conduct a narrative analysis of GoFundMe medical campaigns on social media. At last, she also offers some valuable tips for selecting appropriate QDAS as well as tips for reporting QDAS in research papers.
Multilingual and multimodal interactions in translanguaging computer-mediated communication are among the most trending topics in contemporary digital discourse research. Carmen Lee (Chapter 8) first discusses multilingualism online by examining how political identities are constructed in multilingual hashtags on Instagram related to the 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. In the final part, she also offers some detailed methodological recommendations about future directions for conducting such research. The multimodal resources of communication are another well-recognized characteristic of digital discourse. However, compared to the written language form, multimodal discourse analysis embraces more methodological challenges in data collection, transcription, annotation, and ethical considerations. In Chapter 9, Ruth Page first concentrates on the visual semiotics in her case study of group selfies and Snapchat featured stories. In her chapter-ending considerations, she poses a series of questions that are practical and useful to anyone seeking to figure out workable solutions to the complex challenges in this type of research. In addition, Aditi Bhatia (Chapter 10) also extends the discussion to the aural and kinesthetic forms of communication and takes video data as the research topic. Before introducing the methodological procedures of her case study, she first provides an overview of studies about YouTubers’ online identity construction. Then, by adopting a multidimensional perspective of the method, including insights from genre analysis, pragmatics and van Dijk's sociocognitive model, she successfully illustrates how makeup vloggers on YouTube can adroitly mobilize their multimodal resources to construct an ‘authentic’ self and an ‘expert’ self at the same time in makeup tutorial videos.
The digitized landscape and its continuous growth also provide unprecedented opportunities for business organizations for professional communication, making corporate social media discourse another newly popular research target in digital discourse research. The authors in Chapter 11 (Marie-Louise Brunner and Stefan Diemer) address the approach of cross-platform analysis by observing the customer communication practice of over 50 small and medium-sized enterprises on three different platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram), highlighting the unique characteristics of different platforms and the enterprises’ necessity to tailor them accordingly. They also showcase the advantage of a mix-methods approach of combining quantification appraisal and qualitative reference in digital discourse analysis. As the most widely used quantitative research approach in discourse analysis, corpus linguistics shows its natural interpreting capability in the understanding of large-scale digital texts. Ursula Lutzky and Andrew Kehoe in Chapter 12 illustrate the potential of corpora and corpus tools in digital discourse research, based on the large specialized corpus of tweets of the Irish airline Ryanair.
The final two chapters turn to the methodological aspect of digital ethnography in analyzing online communication discourse. Chapter 13 presents an incisive synthesis of not only the in-depth inquiry into online texts but also contextualized accounts of the users who produce those texts. In Brook Bolander's case study of the negotiation of power through language in personal blogs, she illustrates the effectiveness of the inclusion of both a systematic coding scheme for labeling the screen-based data (i.e., blog posts and comments) and a further questionnaire design for examining the behind-the-scenes user-based intentions of communicators, forming an integrated objectivity-cum-subjectivity-integrated perspective. Finally, Riki Thompson (Chapter 14) continues to focus on the ethnographic-based approach to digital discourse analysis and focuses on how researcher reflexivity works in different stages of the research process. In her project of a multimodal analysis of online dating texts, she includes participants’ reflective interview procedures throughout the duration of her study to better elucidate the cognitive mechanism of why people create the digital texts that they do.
To sum up, this volume is an ideal reference book to advance our understanding of research methods in digital discourse studies. The vastness and diversity in the transdisciplinary domain of digital communication have cultivated creativity and flexibility when exploring its discursive interactions. Throughout the book, the most significant contribution is its reminding significance in clarifying the common methodological challenges and mistakes that can happen in the research process of digital discourse analysis and offering helpful suggestions and recommendations on how to avoid them. Although the absence of certain research topics (e.g., emoji, retweeting, self-presentation, etc.) may disappoint some critical readers, its valuable insights in providing methodological guidance for future digital discourse studies still make it a highly thought-provoking publication for anyone interested in this field.