I was invited to speak at the Yahoo Research Group seminar last week (December 9, 2009) about the research methods I’ve used to study online communities. I called the talk “Digital Ethnography for Social Interaction Design” to capture the essence of what I wanted to cover. There are a number of challenges in studying online communities (the “social interaction design” part) — most notably that you cannot “shadow” someone’s day-to-day activities in a digital space like you can in a physical space. I present social search an example of a social interaction design problem; and then I review the research methods that I’ve used for doing digital ethnography of social search.

I consider this to be a work-in-progress of methods for studying cultural and social behaviors in online, mediated spaces. Please share the methods that you have used or found to be useful so that we can continue the conversation around best practices.