Behind-the-scenes stories of how Internet research projects actually get done. The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected. Digital Research Confidential offers scholars a chance to learn from their fellow researchers' mistakes-and their successes. The book-a follow-up to Eszter Hargittai's widely read Research Confidential-presents behind-the-scenes, nuts-and-bolts stories of digital research projects, written by established and rising scholars. They discuss such challenges as archiving, Web crawling, crowdsourcing, and confidentiality. They do not shrink from specifics, describing such research hiccups as an ethnographic interview so emotionally draining that afterward the researcher retreated to a bathroom to cry, and the seemingly simple research question about Wikipedia that mushroomed into years of work on millions of data points. Digital Research Confidential will be an essential resource for scholars in every field. Contributors Megan Sapnar Ankerson, danah boyd, Amy Bruckman, Casey Fiesler, Brooke Foucault Welles, Darren Gergle, Eric Gilbert, Eszter Hargittai, Brent Hecht, Aron Hsiao, Karrie Karahalios, Paul Leonardi, Kurt Luther, Virag Molnar, Christian Sandvig, Aaron Shaw, Michelle Shumate, Matthew Weber

Relationships make social media social. But not all relationships are created equal. We have colleagues with whom we correspond intensely, but not deeply; we have childhood friends we consider close, even if we fell out of touch. Social media, however, treats everybody the same: someone is either a completely trusted friend or a total stranger, with little or nothing in between. In reality, relationships fall everywhere along this spectrum, a topic social science has investigated for decades under the name tie strength, a term for the strength of a relationship between two people. Despite many compelling findings along this line of research, social media does not incorporate tie strength or its lessons. Neither does most research on large-scale social phenomena. Simply put, we do not understand a basic property of relationships expressed online. Computing and Building around Tie Strength in Social Media takes a wide view of the problem, merging the theories behind tie strength with the data from social media. It shows how to reconstruct tie strength from digital traces in online social media, and how to apply it as a tool in design and analysis. Specifically, this monograph makes two core contributions. First, it offers a rich, high-accuracy and general way to reconstruct tie strength from digital traces; traces like recency and the emotional content of messages. For example, the model can split users into strong and weak ties with nearly 89% accuracy. It outs forward the argument that this offers us a chance to rethink many of social media's most fundamental design elements. Second, it showcases an example of how we can redesign social media using tie strength: a Twitter application open to anyone on the internet which puts tie strength at the heart of its design. Through this application, called We Meddle, it is shown that the tie strength model generalizes to a new online community, and that it can solve real people's practical problems with social media. In a sense, Computing and Building around Tie Strength in Social Media links the online to the offline as it connects the traces we leave in social media to how we feel about relationships in real life.