YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States

Digital studies on culture may be distinguished from cultural studies of the digital at least in terms of method. The lecture takes up the question of the distinctiveness of ‘digital methods’ for researching Internet cultures. It asks, initially, should the methods of study change, however slightly or wholesale, given the specificity of the new medium? The larger digital methods project thereby engages with ‘virtual methods,’ the current, dominant ‘e-science’ approach to the study of the Internet, and the consequences for research of importing standard methods from the social sciences in particular. What kinds of contributions are made to digital media studies, and the Internet in particular, when traditional methods are imported from the social sciences and the humanities onto the medium? Which research opportunities are foreclosed? Second, I ask, what kinds of new approaches are worthwhile, given an emphasis on the ‘natively digital’ as opposed to digitization. The goal is also to change the focus of humanities and humanities computing away from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and instead inquires into both the ‘born digital’ as well as digital-only cultures, that is, the ‘technicity of content’ and the environments that sustain it. In all, the effort is to develop and disseminate novel approaches to the study of natively digital objects (the link, the tag, etc.) and devices (engines and other recommendation machines). It does so by critically reviewing existing approaches to the study of the digital, and subsequently by proposing research strategies that follow the medium. That is, how do digital objects and the devices that capture them change the order of things? How may one demonstrate the ‘media effects’ of a device-centric information culture? The lecture launches a novel strand of study, digital methods.

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