Doing Media Research

Michael Stevenson is an associate professor of new media and digital culture at the University of Amsterdam. His research interests include the history of new media and open source culture. He has published research in the journals New Media & Society, Internet Histories, The European Journal of Media Studies, among others. He created the short documentary Geeks in Cyberspace: A Story from The Early Web in 2019, and plays third base for the Neptunus Baseball & Softball club’s sixth division amateur baseball team.Misha Kavka is professor of cross-media culture at the University of Amsterdam and co-founder of the research group Queer Analysis at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis. She has published widely on gender, sexuality, celebrity and affect in relation to television, film and media technologies. She is the author of Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy (2008) and Reality TV (2012), and the co-editor of volumes and special issues on reality television, gothic culture and feminist theory.

• Section I: FundamentalsChapter 1. What is research?Chapter 2. What is an idea?Chapter 3. What is a media research topic?Chapter 4. What is a research question?Chapter 5. What is a theoretical framework?Chapter 6. What is method?Chapter 7. What is analysis?Chapter 8. What is ethical research?Section II. The research processChapter 9. Choosing sources and collecting dataChapter 10. Picking apart and piecing together: interpreting media textsChapter 11. Sorting and counting: structured analysis of media contentChapter 12. Asking and listening: researching with producers, audiences and usersChapter 13. Mapping and visualizing: illustrating ideas and exploring dataSection III. The writing processChapter 14. Genres of research writingChapter 15. ArgumentationChapter 16. Responsible citationChapter 17. Giving and receiving feedback

Doing Media Research offers an essential helping hand to guide us down the rabbit hole of our media, at each step reminding us how much fun it is to study and learn about what shapes our lives the most.