Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk: Methods for Analyzing Online Conversations

People have been talking together online now for nearly four decades. While the phenomenon has many names and forms, including social media, discussion forums, and computer-mediated communication, the core activity of people engaging in digital conversations continues to grow as way we connect and interact with others. Research into what happens in these spaces has a long history across many disciplines, but little attention has been paid to ensuring the methodological practices needed to produce trustworthy and valid findings that answer important research questions. In this webinar, Dr. Trena Paulus and Dr. Alyssa Wise share the framework from their recent book, Looking for Insight, Transformation and Learning in Online Talk (Routledge, 2019), developed to guide scholars in their studies of online conversations. In doing so, they present a series of clear design decisions to help researchers frame their object of interest, unpack underlying assumptions, ethically extract and organize data for analysis, and apply rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods to answer their research questions.