Virtual Methods

110 • Christine Hine
for summarizing data and exploring patterns. The chapters in this part employ both
qualitative and quantitative methods in their exploration of how to define a
research site and how to visualise and analyse it.
Case Studies in the Exploration of Research Sites
The first two chapters in this part examine diametrically opposed approaches to the
spatiality of online interactions. Martin Dodge explores the role of mapping in
developing an understanding of online spatiality, and illustrates some research
strategies that this perspective on the geography of online connections suggests.
He demonstrates that mapping provides some provocative ways to conceptualize
research sites and explore interactions. These methods exploit the visibility and
traceability of online activity in order to provide ways for researchers to develop
and explore hypotheses about the shape of social interactions facilitated by the
Internet.
In stark contrast to Dodge’s treatment of the online as a distinctive and spatially
complex sphere of social action, Hugh Mackay asserts the importance of understanding
new media use within traditional contexts. Mackay begins with the location
of the home, and argues that understanding online interactions can usefully
build on existing traditions of media use ethnography. He makes the case that
informants have an integrated approach to online and offline activity which does
not carve out the ‘online’ as a relevant social sphere. Methodological approaches
which value participant perspectives can usefully therefore start, not in online
spaces, but in the home.
A third perspective on the spatiality of research methods is provided by Mário
J. L. Guimarães Jr, who proposes that we follow our informants and their social
networks. Here it becomes apparent that the relevant contexts to study are defined
not by particular software applications, but by the ways in which a specific social
network chooses to combine various forms of communication. In his ethnography
of an online graphical environment Guimarães shows the importance of gaining
access to and appreciating the organization of participants’ social networks. In
similar vein to Mackay, Guimarães argues for the ethnographer’s sensitivity to the
specificities of the setting as a means to progressively define the field site. The two
case studies come to dramatically different conclusions, but build upon similar
principles.
The distributed and hyperlinked structure of the World Wide Web provides a
distinctive challenge for the definition of research sites. Steven M. Schneider &
Kirsten A. Foot propose the concept of the ‘web sphere’ as the unit of analysis, as
a way to examine the formations that arise when multiple web sites on a given
theme are created. The notion of the web sphere emphasizes the importance of
emergent social structures in online settings. While they might be triggered in