Personal documents on the Internet: what’s new and what’s old

Abstract

In this article some of the main methodological issues that arise in doing research using the Internet are presented. We firstly distinguish two main methodological areas: sociology with Internet and sociology on Internet. This work is mainly devoted to the sociology on Internet. We suggest that research on Internet has features which are highly continuative with documentary analysis, a type of enquiry which is already part of the tool box of social researchers. Some on line documents in particular may rightfully be considered as personal documents in traditional sense: e.g. blogs, e-mails, personal sites, forums, albums on line. A possible matching between traditional personal documents and web-mediated personal documents is proposed. It is certainly true that personal documents on line reveal specific features. In particular, since they are published on the web, “personal” documents are permeated with a “public” dimension which makes their significance distinctive. Specific stratagems are also necessary in the collection, contextualisation and analysis stages. In this paper some of the theoretic, ethic and technical issues that arise from the use of web mediated personal documents are discussed. This article contains no solutions, but rather a list, a sort of reminder, of the open questions. Nor is it possible to provide answers to many of the questions submitted: due to their complexity and relative newness, the scientific community has not yet given clear and shared answers to these questions.

Authors and Affiliations

Laura Arosio

Keywords

Related Articles

Success IS a choice! Explaining success in Academic Preparation Programs in Israel

Operating within universities and colleges, Academic Preparation Programs in Israel (APPs) allow students in their twenties a second chance to pass their matriculation examinations, a requirement for acceptance by acad...

The impending collapse of the European urban middle class: the European Union's de-naturing of space and place

The authors argue that the various middle classes of Europe, especially Western Europe, are being fragilised as a result of globalization, certain political tendencies and especially by the standardization of space and...

Reading romance: the impact Facebook rituals can have on a romantic relationship

Despite the fact that research has identified intimate relationships as being an important factor in how people look to present themselves on social networking sites, there still remains a lack of research in this doma...

The clones: a new phenomenon in the literary environment

The article is an introduction to a rather recent phenomenon present in the Romanian literary environment: “the clones”. They are somehow linked to pseudonyms and Pessoa’s heteronyms but at the same time they bring som...

Identity, small stories and interpretative repertoires in research interviews. An account of market researchers’ discursive positioning strategies

My main purpose in this paper is to illustrate how participants in a research interview occasioned conversation make use of two important discursive devices, namely: small stories and interpretative repertoires for pos...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP40917
  • DOI -
  • Views 304
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Laura Arosio (2010). Personal documents on the Internet: what’s new and what’s old. Journal of Comparative Research in Anthropology and Sociology, 1(2), -. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-40917