Further Reading

Further reading links to supplement your studies.

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The following books and articles provide good examples of researching virtual communities

  • Driscoll and Gregg (2010) offers a corrective for anyone tempted to think an online ethnography is quick and easy – showing the complexities of engaging with online fora. They show how online ethnography challenges certain notions of presence but also repeats some elements of intimate understandings of how communities work.
    Driscoll, C. and M. Gregg (2010) ‘My profile: The ethics of virtual ethnography’, Emotion, Space and Society 3 (1):15‒20.
     
  • Gordon, E., and A. de Souza e Silva (2011) provides a series of examples of different social media fusing into and transforming daily life. There is less methodological discussion but useful to get a sense of diverse kinds of communities, their locations and digital mediation.
    Gordon, E. and A. de Souza e Silva (2011) Net Locality: Why location matters in a networked world. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.
  • Hargittai, E. and Sandvig, C. (2015) has a series of more or less confessional essays by prominent researchers telling of pitfalls, triumphs and dilemmas.
    Hargittai, E.and Sandvig, C. (2015) Digital Research Confidential: The secrets of studying behavior online. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Longan (2015) offers an account of researching community supported online partly through looking at the materials and web sites involved but also through extensive interviews with the people who make it happen.
    Longan, M. W. (2015) ‘Cybergeography IRL’, Cultural Geographies 22 (2): 217‒29.
  • Luh Sin (2015) provides an account of using social media while doing fieldwork and later to keep in touch with a case study while far away and the ethical conundrums it posed of what constituted fieldwork and what was shared with whom in what she terms the Field2.0.
    Luh Sin, H. (2015) ‘"You're Not Doing Work, You're on Facebook!": Ethics of Encountering the Field Through Social Media’, The Professional Geographer 67 (4): 676‒85.

Online resources

Pulse of the Nation: U.S. Mood Throughout the Day inferred from Twitter