Gabriele Colombo, Politecnico di Milano
"The web as a source of data: An introduction to digital methods"
This talk introduces students to concepts, tools, and good practices for collecting, formatting, and analyzing data from online spaces. It starts with a concise introduction to the subjectivity of the data collection process and its similarities with the design process. It then situates the web as a source of data for studying society at large (beyond online culture). The talk turns to practical applications in digital methods research, including building lists of actors and sources, analyzing comments in social media, analyzing visual content from online sources, performing cross-platform analysis, and studying cultural specificities through the web. Through seminal case studies in digital methods research, the talk demonstrates how online data can be leveraged to study society and culture, with particular emphasis on its integration into user research.
Gabriele Colombo is a researcher at the Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano, and a member of DensityDesign Lab. Previously, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. He is affiliated with the Visual Methodologies Collective at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. He is the co-author, with Sabine Niederer, of Visual Methods for Digital Research (Polity, 2024).
