Digital Methods

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.