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Chapter 16 - The Rich Facets of Digital Trace Data

from Part III - Illustrative Examples and Emergent Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

By
Jonas Valbjørn Andersen  and
Philipp Hukal
Edited by
Boyka Simeonova  and
Robert D. Galliers
Boyka Simeonova
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
Robert D. Galliers
Affiliation:
Bentley University, Massachusetts and Warwick Business School
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Summary

Increasing digitalization means that many of our daily interactions happen within digital environments where they leave digital footprints in the form of trace data. Such digital trace data is often thought to generate insights by virtue of its immense scale. This focus on ‘big data’ tends to overlook the richness and complex characteristics of digital traces that opens new vistas for a multitude of computational analyses that generate new and high-resolution insights to digital environments. As such, paying attention to the characteristics of trace data allows for deep investigations of social-technical interactions in unprecedented detail.

This chapter describes the process of digital trace analysis through four analytical activities aimed at identifying units of analysis, extracting categories, validating patterns and conceptualizing findings from digital trace data. It then shows how analytical activities can be applied to a given digital trace dataset to derive three ‘facets’ that each provide rich conceptualizations of social interaction with technology. It explains each facet and outlines ways to implement digital trace analyses that focus on facets relating to relations (network analysis), processes (sequence analysis) or semantics (text analysis).

Keywords

digital trace datacomputational social sciencecomputational qualitative analysisnetwork analysistopic modellingsequence analysis
Type
Chapter
Information
Cambridge Handbook of Qualitative Digital Research , pp. 247 - 267
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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