Foundations of Digital Methods Query Design

Broadly speaking digital methods may be considered the deployment of online tools and data for the purposes of social and medium research. More speci cally, they derive from online methods, or methods of the medium, which are reimagined and repurposed for research. The methods to be repurposed are often built into dominant devices for recommending sources or drawing attention to oneself or one’s posts. For an example of how to reimagine the inputs and outputs of one such dominant device, consider the di ference between studying search engine results to understand in some manner Google’s algorithms, or recent algorithmic updates, or treating them, as in the Google Flu Trends project, as indications of societal concerns. Here, there is a shift from studying the medium to using device data to study the societal. That is, akin to the digital methods outlook generally, Google Flu Trends and other anticipatory instruments use online social signals to measure trends not so much in the online realm but rather ‘in the wild’.