Compare methods

	Digital Methods	Web Controversy Analysis
Field	Science Technology Studies	Science Technology Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2013	2012
Originator	Richard Rogers, Amsterdam Digital Methods Initiative	Tommaso Venturini, Noortje Marres
Type	Empirical research approach for online data	Web-native controversy research method
Seminal source	Rogers, R. (2013). Digital Methods. MIT Press. ISBN: 9780262018838	Venturini, T. (2012). Building on faults: how to represent controversies with digital methods. Public Understanding of Science, 21(7), 796-812.
Aliases	Follow the medium, Natively digital research, Web epistemology methods	Web controversy mapping, Hyperlink controversy analysis, Online controversy cartography
Related	4	4
Summary	Digital methods is an empirical research approach, developed by Richard Rogers and the Amsterdam Digital Methods Initiative, that takes the methods of online platforms and devices—the link, the like, the hashtag, the search engine ranking—and repurposes them for social and cultural research. Its guiding maxim is to 'follow the medium': rather than importing offline methods like the survey onto the web, the analyst learns what the medium already counts, ranks, and recommends, and turns those native operations into research instruments.	Web controversy analysis studies scientific, technical, and public controversies through the traces they leave online—hyperlink networks, search-engine results, and social-media activity. Building on the controversy-mapping tradition but reworking it as a web-native digital method, it follows Tommaso Venturini's call to 'build on faults' and Noortje Marres's argument for controversy analysis as a digital method, using crawling and co-link analysis to reveal how positions in a dispute are connected, opposed, and arranged across the web.