Digital Methods
Also known as: Follow the medium, Natively digital research, Web epistemology 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.
Key highlights
- Leverages data that platforms already produce at scale, granting access to publics and issues that conventional methods reach slowly or not at all.
- The 'follow the medium' principle yields medium-specific, situated findings rather than imposing ill-fitting offline instruments onto online life.
- Repurposing native operations (ranking, recommendation, co-link) gives a reflexive grip on how platforms themselves order knowledge and visibility.
- Supported by a mature, openly documented toolset from the Digital Methods Initiative, enabling reproducible and teachable research designs.
Intuition
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How it works
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When to use it
Use digital methods when your research object lives substantially online and when the platforms involved produce traces—links, posts, rankings, engagement metrics—that can be queried, scraped, or accessed via API. The approach suits the study of issues, publics, controversies, and source hierarchies as they form on the web, and it rewards researchers willing to learn each platform's native logics. It assumes that the medium is a legitimate site and instrument of social research rather than mere noise to be filtered out. It is less appropriate when the phenomenon leaves few digital traces, when platform access is closed or unstable, when offline context is decisive, or when the medium's own biases would overwhelm the social signal you seek.
Strengths & limitations
- Leverages data that platforms already produce at scale, granting access to publics and issues that conventional methods reach slowly or not at all.
- The 'follow the medium' principle yields medium-specific, situated findings rather than imposing ill-fitting offline instruments onto online life.
- Repurposing native operations (ranking, recommendation, co-link) gives a reflexive grip on how platforms themselves order knowledge and visibility.
- Supported by a mature, openly documented toolset from the Digital Methods Initiative, enabling reproducible and teachable research designs.
- Findings are entangled with platform logics and algorithm changes, so the medium's biases can be mistaken for social facts.
- API restrictions, rate limits, and platform 'deplatforming' of researchers make data access fragile and results hard to reproduce over time.
- Trace data captures recorded behaviour, not meaning, motivation, or offline context, limiting interpretive depth without complementary methods.
- Sampling is bounded by what the medium counts, so silent actors, private spaces, and non-users are systematically underrepresented.
Common pitfalls
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Applications
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Frequently asked
How do digital methods differ from 'virtual methods' or general computational social science?
Virtual methods take established offline instruments—surveys, interviews, focus groups—and run them online, treating the web as a neutral container. Digital methods instead 'follow the medium', repurposing the platform's own native operations (ranking, linking, liking) as research instruments. Compared with computational social science generally, digital methods is distinguished by its STS sensibility: it foregrounds how the medium and its devices co-produce the data, rather than treating online traces as raw behavioural records.
What is a 'natively digital' object?
A natively digital object is one that is born of the medium and counted by it—a hyperlink, a tag, a like, a timestamp, a search ranking, a recommendation. It is contrasted with a digitised object, such as a scanned book or an online questionnaire, which merely migrated to the web. The method's distinctive leverage comes from studying natively digital objects, because they already carry the platform's logics of relevance and association that the researcher can repurpose.
Do platform restrictions and the 'post-API age' make digital methods obsolete?
They make it harder but not obsolete. As major platforms have closed or throttled their APIs, the Digital Methods Initiative and its tools have adapted toward platform-compliant scraping, data donation, and the study of recommendation and interface dynamics. The reflexive core—negotiating an interface with the device's live methods—remains, but researchers must now document access conditions even more carefully and treat data fragility as part of the object of study.
Sources
- 1.Rogers, R. (2013). Digital Methods. MIT Press.ISBN 9780262018838
- 2.Marres, N., & Gerlitz, C. (2016). Interface methods: renegotiating relations between digital social research, STS and sociology. The Sociological Review, 64(1), 21-46.
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Cite this page
ScholarGate. (2026, June 22). Digital Methods. ScholarGate. https://scholargate.app/science-technology-studies/digital-methods-sts