Researching Digital Life: Orientations, Methods and Practice - Softcover

James Ash; Rob Kitchin; Agnieszka Leszczynski

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1529601657 ISBN 13: 9781529601657

Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2024

Synopsis

We now live in a world where all aspects of everyday life are thoroughly mediated by digital technologies. Making sense of digital life is accordingly an essential undertaking for social science and humanities scholars.

This multidisciplinary book provides an essential guide to researching digital life:

• Orienting readers with respect to methodologies, research design, and research ethics.
• Detailing key research methods, including interviews, surveys, ethnographies, walking methodologies, arts-based and participatory approaches, historical analysis, data visualisation, mapping and data analytics.
• Demonstrating these methods in action in real-world studies that have investigated apps and interfaces, social and locative media, mobilities, smart cities, and digital labour and work.

The authors provide:
• Non-Eurocentric perspectives and case studies from diverse disciplines 
• Annotated further reading to help you situate your research alongside existing research in your field 
• An outline of future directions for researching digital life.

Accessible in style and richly illustrated, the chapters provide a wealth of key insights and practical information to ensure research projects are successfully planned and implemented.

About this title

About the Authors

James Ash is a geographer and Senior Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at Newcastle University. His research investigates the cultures, economies and politics of digital interfaces. He is author of Phase Media: Space Time and the Politics of Smart Objects (Bloomsbury, 2017) and The Interface Envelope: Gaming, Technology, Power (Bloomsbury Press, 2015).

 

Rob Kitchin is a Professor in Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Department of Geography. He was a European Research Council Advanced Investigator on the Programmable City project (2013-2018) and a principal investigator on the Building City Dashboards project (2016-2020) and for the Digital Repository of Ireland (2009-2017). He is the (co)author or (co)editor of 31 other academic books, and (co)author of over 200 articles and book chapters. He has been an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography, Progress in Human Geography and Social and Cultural Geography, and was the co-Editor-in-Chief of the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. He was the 2013 recipient of the Royal Irish Academy’s Gold Medal for the Social Sciences.

Agnieszka Leszczynski is a Lecturer in the School of Environment at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her work is situated at the subdisciplinary interfaces of GIScience and human geography and examines issues around geospatial technologies and critical GIScience. She has published a range of articles in leading Geography journals including Progress in Human Geography and Environment and Planning D: Society and Space.

From the Back Cover

A sophisticated introduction to the diversity and interconnectivity of digital space, technology, objects, people and data. It sets out the theory and methods needed to understand digital life and then links them to real world data showcasing their strengths and challenges.

Edition details

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1529601657
• ISBN 13: 9781529601657
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304