I like that Baker acknowledges how his own personal biases helped shape his data model, and that he does not attempt to apologize for it. That there was a high degree of subjectivity in Baker's research does not make his findings any less valuable.

The nature of qualitative research is such that it must necessarily be informed by the researcher's own mental frameworks.

This is a good point which makes me rethink my previous position on how including this data would have made Baker's argument more persuasive.

By choosing to only include information which would advance one of his arguments, Baker avoids bogging his reader down with superfluous details.

His blog acts as a dynamic and live extension to his book; it is where he can give elaborate explanations of his analysis without having to fear he has lost the reader.

Although I understand why Baker chose to omit these graphs from the published version of his book, I do not believe he made the right call.

Given how formative he says that these visual representations were in the realization of his central argument, it would seem logical for him to include them in his book.

I understand that the graphs merely represent his data in a visual form, but I would argue that this actually makes his analysis and interpretation more persuasive.

If the visual representations of Baker's data assist the reader in following his thought process, this can only be a good thing.

This debate over the ethics of archiving potentially sensitive--and yet public--personal blogs is fascinating to me.

While I am sure that personal blogs have the potential to be instructive for future generations, it is likely that MySpace users did not have the same level of awareness regarding the permanence of the Internet as today's users of social media.

I am more sympathetic to the side that wants to protect such personal records from being archived and publicly accessible; however, there are likely compelling arguments in favour of archiving this data that I am simply unaware of.

I have read and I agree to abide by the Code of Conduct.

Maybe I am interpreting this too literally, but I would add that the ability to conduct micro- and macro-level research is something that would benefit not only historians but also the majority of academics in the humanities and social sciences.

For my undergraduate thesis project in Criminology, I struggled with deciding which methodology worked best with my dataset. Given the nature of my research, which involved looking at mass media constructions of the HIV/AIDS crisis throughout history, I ended up conducting a critical discourse analysis.

Although I thoroughly enjoyed writing my thesis paper, I cannot help but wonder how much deeper my analysis could have been had I employed digital methods of research.

What an incredibly useful research tool. Any legal research I have ever done has been on CanLii, QuickLaw and WestLaw. I never found any of these databases particularly user-friendly.

I can see how there would have been a huge demand for this kind of tool.

I need to get into the habit of annotating.

This link appears to be broken.

Thanks for linking to Melissa's project. It's nice to get a feel for the kind of contents that other students have chosen to share in the past.

https://github.com/alinapringle http://citizensofinhumanity.com/