Timothy Recuber

This Friday at 1:45 I’ll be presenting at the Eastern Sociological Society’s annual meetings as part of the Digital Sociology mini-conference. The talk is entitled “Combing the wreckage: Discourse analysis in forgotten digital spaces.” Its partly a defense of small-data methodologies in the face of the seeming ascendance of big data in the sociology of the Internet. And partly its a way to think through the methodologies I’ve used on my last three projects, and to share those thoughts with others. Future generations of sociologists won’t need to struggle with how to do their work with online data and in virtual spaces–they’ll have advisors who are well versed in this stuff and methodology texts to guide them. But this stuff is all relatively new for those of us who are doing it right now, and we’ve often had to figure out how to negotiate the Internet as a research site in a very ad hoc or piecemeal fashion. So I’m really excited to learn from others and share what I’ve learned this weekend at the ESS.