How to Glean Culture from an Evolving Internet: Richard Rogers, Digital Methods

Methodological discussion among historians of science and technology typically manifests as semiphilosophical reflection on the means by which knowledge and technologies are produced, and the ways in which they interact with politics and culture. The idea is that the proper interpretation of sources and the development of proper narratives hinge on a sound understanding of such issues. By comparison, only fleeting attention is generally paid to more technical questions, such as how historical documents are produced and accessed. Richard Rogers’s Digital Methods (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Pp. 275. $42) is about exactly that type of question.

Rogers, who holds a chair in new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam, defines the term “digital methods” in a fairly strict way. First, the concept is not to be conflated with the “digital humanities.” Digital methods are not about using computers and the Internet to analyze and present work; they are about mining the Internet for source material for social scientific and humanistic analysis. Second, digital methods pertain to content that is born digital, and so do not encompass things like the digitized library holdings found in Google Books. Thus, Digital Methods will mainly interest sociologists, anthropologists, and historians studying history from the 1990s to the present. Finally, Rogers is not interested in online culture as a peculiar form of culture (i.e., cyberculture). He is interested in how we can use online sources to study culture generally, much as a historian might ponder how culture can and cannot be perceived in sources such as historical cinema or preserved correspondence.

Yet Digital Methods is not about anthropological methodology. Rogers does not spend much time discussing what kinds of voices are and are not to be found in various online locations. There is also no discussion of what online texts might or might not reveal about the broader systems of ideas held by the people who produced those texts. Digital Methods is more like a manual intended for people from a variety of disciplines who may wish to start using digital source material.

Of course, one should note from Rogers’s examples of digital methods in action that he (and his students and colleagues) tend to use these methods to glean suggestive fragments of culture from the vast trove of online sources that exist. For instance, one key example involves using search engines within different national domains (e.g., .uk, .fr, .ar) to examine the different types of “rights” (e.g., human rights, children’s rights, cyclists’ rights) that appear in highly ranked search results. The idea is to gain insight into what sorts of rights are most prevalent in different national cultures. But what broader conclusions should we draw from such findings? That is beyond the scope of the book. Caveat emptor.

Despite all the things that digital methods do not encompass, the concept does capture a diverse set of considerations. An early chapter describes how one can chart the ways that various sites do and do not link to each other, thereby revealing the “politics” of linking. This method can be used to gauge which organizations are regarded as authoritative in different communities, or how communities use links to draw on the prestige of more prevalent organizations and to promote less prevalent organizations, or how sites avoid linking to other sites to avoid, for instance, implying an endorsement of the site’s owners.

The next chapter discusses how website archiving works (most notably through the Wayback Machine at archive.org) and how it fails to archive such content as comments, cookies, and advertisements. As advertisements from print media archives are presently considered a rich source for cultural analysis, such limitations should be taken seriously. Even so, examining the evolution of an organization’s website can provide important insights into changes in the organization’s declared priorities (reflected, for instance, in how items are presented on or removed from its website’s front page), into how it has responded to external events, and even into long-term cultural shifts reflected in trends such as an increasing use of radical rhetoric...