Guiding Methodological Choices in Digital Ethnography: A Decision-Making Framework

Abstract

As internet communications continue to change rapidly, including public access to large language model systems and new limitations on Application Programming Interface (API) access used to gather data from online platforms, research methods for gathering and analyzing digital big data need to be revisited. Digital ethnography is presented here as a continually developing transdisciplinary methodology, often applied in social sciences and digital humanities, that involves collecting and analyzing digital corpora. This article aims to provide a mixed methodological framework for digital ethnographic decision-making that includes considering how many field sites to select, how much data to collect, whether to participate in an online community or silently observe from a distance, and how to consider ethical and analytic challenges when processing digital data. This article reconciles and updates previous terminology appearing in cross-disciplinary studies of online cultures (e.g., “lurking”), highlights key ethical considerations for digital ethnographic practices, prompts scoping decision, and draws attention to a series of potential biases for either individual or team-based researchers to consider before conducting new studies. Scholars may use this comprehensive mixed methods framework for decision-making when employing digital ethnography and to aid with structuring a methods section in their research designs.