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.
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.
