Digital methods for media and communication research

This chapter discusses some of the digital methods most commonly used in media and communication research, with a particular emphasis on their application to digitally born media, for instance, social media, websites, and digital interpersonal communication. The potential of digital methods rests on the creation and capture of data that have come to permeate every aspect of private and public, political and commercial life in the developed world. Large collections of digital data are valuable precisely because they can be used to infer relevant information about users. From the point of view of media and communication research, the advent of big data has given rise to several methodological and empirical opportunities while also presenting some notable limitations and involving necessary precautions. The field of media and communication research was founded on the realization that communication flows in two steps.

Big data · Communication studies · Data mining · Data science · Digital media · Field (mathematics) · Interpersonal communication · Mass communication · Multimedia · Point (geometry) · Realization (probability) · Social media · Social science · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Social Media and Politics