When I first purchased Andrew Abbott’s “Digital Paper: A Manual for Research and Writing with Library and Internet Materials” I did not realize he was a sociologist of knowledge, which is why my comment on his ethnographic approach (below, on my Twitter thread) is ill-informed. I recently read an interview with him about Digital Paper (“Andrew Abbott on brute-force research, the future of libraries, and what makes good research good”) which made me reconsider and actually search for my Twitter thread and publish it in long-form blog post so that people can refer to it.
I should disclose that I work with a lot of the material that Abbott uses: I am a library lover and I use a lot of textual material from archival, interview and other primary and secondary sources. So, for me and my own students, Digital Paper is a good book to have, read up on and refer to.
Definitely recommend if your students don’t have any experience doing research because he walks them through the iterative and non-linear elements of research (we search for data, read, draft, write, edit, read some more, write some more, revise, submit). It’s not so linear. pic.twitter.com/jUxchDeHQo
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 6, 2019
I liked that Abbott is very specific about his data sources and research method (library materials and secondary sources) and his most used two strategies: selective scanning (choose a few sources) and “brute force” (Read All The Things). The book has a chapter on reading!
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 6, 2019
Bottom line: this book is really good, and worth using to teach research design, research paradigms or methods, overall. This is a great review of Digital Paper by Professor Alex Golub. I don’t know if I would call Digital Paper The Best Research Book EVAR but I think it IS fantastic. Particularly for those of us who work with textual data.
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