Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research

Book excerpt: This collection reflects the need for suitable methods to answer emerging questions that result from the ever-changing media environment. As media technologies and infrastructures become inseparably interwoven with social constellations, scholars from varying disciplines increasingly investigate their characteristics, functioning, relevance and impact – facing new methodological challenges as well as opportunities. Innovative Methods in Media and Communication Research engages with the substantial need to rethink established methods to research acute changes in the media environment. The book gathers chapters dedicated to the multifacetedness and liveliness of emerging methods – from lifelogging and ethnography to digital methods and visualization – while embedding them in the rich history of interdisciplinary empirical research. Innovation here is a call for widening and rethinking research methods to stimulate a sophisticated debate on and exploration of contemporary methodological approaches for scholars at various levels of academic life. Accompanied by introductory sections of prominent scholars, the majority of empirical studies gathered in this volume are accomplished through early-career scholars who strive to advance cutting-edge and in parts even provocative approaches for the study of media and communication. The book's four sections on Materiality, Technology, Experience and Visualization are introduced by Saskia Sassen, Noortje Marres, Sarah Pink and Lev Manovich.