Qualitative Methods for Digital Social Research

This volume offers a series of practical methods to study digital behaviours considering the socio-cultural realities of the global south. It includes methodologically rigorous applied research chapters from leading international researchers offering information on gold mines and blind spots in researching the digital in the global south. It  develops a tri-sectional format based on distinct areas of research, geographical variability and diversity of methods and approaches. The first section focuses on Dissecting Research Fractures – which disrupts the established research ideologies and practices, user behaviors, theoretical perspectives, and field methods in the study of digital social research . The second section  on Innovating Methods proposes and extends mixed methodologies that go beyond research boundaries to produce novel possibilities for study. The final section on Re-Imagining the Field breaks new ground in exploring the social-digital where a transient research field is contextualized and stabilized through the social, infrastructural, and digital interweaving. The book offers the reader an inside view of studying marginal yet emerging users and consumers of digital technologies. The three sections together purport to draw textual, graphical, temporal, and ethnographic insights via innovative and hybrid observational tools to record, annotate and formulate everyday experiences of digital life. The volume addresses scholars interested in hybridizing methods, early career researchers, and graduates working on connecting humans and digital technologies. It also holds considerable appeal for digital marketers and strategists, offering practically applicable methods to study digital life.

Nimmi Rangaswamy is Professor at the Kohli Centre on Intelligent Systems, Indian Institute of Information Technology, IIIT, Hyderabad,  where she brings an anthropological lens to understanding the impacts of AI research and praxis.  Formerly, she was Adjunct Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad  teaching courses at the intersections of society and technology. In the domain of industry research, she was a senior research scientist and lead the Human Interactions research area at the Xerox Research Center India working in the building of technologies in the areas of consumer-centric health care and urban mobility. Previously, her job at Microsoft Research India was a combination of theoretical analysis and ethnographic field research to understand technology use in developing countries. These are studies to understand patterns of technology adoption in various social contexts and spaces in India, ranging from middle-class consumption of domestic media, the business models of cyber cafés, and the use of mobile internet and Facebook among urban slum youth.

Shriram Venkatraman is an Assistant Professor of Business and Management at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), and a Fellow of the Danish Institute  for Advanced Study, at Odense, Denmark. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi (IIIT-D) and was an Adjunct Faculty at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode (IIM-K). Other than several peer-reviewed journal articles, he is also the author of a monograph titled 'Social Media in South India' (UCL Press) and co-author of a comparative book 'How the World Changed Social Media' (also UCL Press).  He has taught several courses on Digital & Economic Anthropology and Digital Research Methods both at IIIT-Delhi and at IIM-Kozhikode. He has co-taught a MOOC course on 'Anthropology of Social Media' on Futurelearn. He has a PhD in Digital  Anthropology from University College London, UK. He is also a trained professional statistician and has held leadership positions at Walmart, USA.