Kits for Digital MethodsDoing Sociotechnical Research
Edited by Angela K. VandenBroek and Nicole Taylor
Kits for Digital Methods: Doing Sociotechnical Research is a guide to innovating research methods for a world where digital technologies permeate everyday life and research. Drawing on the expertise of leading sociotechnical researchers, it reimagines the “kit” not as a fixed set of tools or solutions, but as a flexible, transparent, and collaborative framework for methodological experimentation. These kits are sandboxes for experimenting, playing, and reflecting on the ethics and possibilities of digital research.
Organized into three sections—Digital Engagement, Digital Elicitation, and Digital Data—contributors share their processes for designing and adapting methods to complex digital contexts. Each chapter contains background, components, practical guidance, and lessons learned for exploring the frictions, failures, and surprises that shape sociotechnical research.
Kits range from remote fieldwork and social media ethnography to participatory analysis, collaborative image description, and AI-assisted elicitation—filled with concrete techniques for engaging digital environments, eliciting novel forms of data, and working with digital materials. This volume encourages adaptation, remixing, and the creation of new kits, fostering a culture of openness and methodological innovation. Written for researchers, educators, and students across the social sciences and humanities, it demystifies advanced digital methods while encouraging critical thinking, ethical reflexivity, and creative problem-solving.
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Praise for Kits
“Using “kits” as open-ended frameworks for practical innovation, this volume provides a remarkable foundation for digital methods. From images and video to AI; from collaboration to programming; from teaching STEM students to building an academic website—and so much more—it’s a true resource. I’ll use it for years to come.”
—Tom Boellstorff, Department of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine, United States
“Kits for Digital Methods brilliantly challenges and reimagines the technosolutionist concept of toolkit, offering instead a reflexive approach to critical engagement with sociotechnical systems. By treating kits as boundary objects, the volume helps spur methodological innovation through experimental, collaborative and ethical engagement with the shifting terrain of digital life.”
—Dominic Boyer, Social Design Lab, Rice University, United States
“Kits is a source of inspiration and guidance to social researchers exploring the intricacies of digital mediation. Through open reflections on their experiences, the authors offer valuable insights on how to engage with digital technologies in innovative ways. A must have for digital ethnographers as well as media and STS scholars.”
—Paula Uimonen, Department of Social Anthropology, Stockholm University, Sweden
“This kit of kits offers something rare for anthropologists interested in digital research: concrete advice! The chapters here will help researchers figure out how to approach fields from Facebook to YouTube or AI to UX, with well-considered guidance and reflection on what our methods are good for.”
—Nick Seaver, Department of Anthropology, Tufts University, United States
“Kits for Digital Methods is an invaluable resource. It will help all of those who are looking to innovate their methodologies and reconceptualize their toolbox into a blended format which keeps with the critical tradition of the social sciences and the humanities while at the same time drives forward the practical real-world engagement of living methods. Not only a must-read, but a must-implement book.”
—Lora Koycheva, Technical University of Brandenburg and founder of Robots, actually!, Germany
“This volume is a pick-n-mix of social research methods. From participatory approaches and reflexive methods, to modes of inquiry that use creative practice and emerging technologies, to kits that boost your data analysis; VandenBroek and Taylor have assembled an impressive range of contributors in this handbook for researchers and students.”
—Rebekah Cupitt, Digital Design, Birkbeck, University of London, United Kingdom
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