Trena M. Paulus is Professor of Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, USA.Alyssa Friend Wise is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Director of the Learning Analytics Research Network at New York University, USA.

• List of Figures. List of Tables. Preface. Acknowledgements 1. Why Investigate Online Talk? Introducing the Research Design Framework 2. What Are We Looking For? Identifying the Object of Interest 3. What Does Online Talk Represent? Philosophical Assumptions and Methodological Alignment 4. What is the Research Question and Approach? Informing the Study Design from Prior Work 5. When Can Online Talk Be Treated as Data? Ethical Practices 6. How Will the Data Be Acquired? Characterizing, Bounding, and Extracting Online Talk as a Data Source 7. (with Robyn Singleton) How Will the Data be Analyzed? Part One: Quantitative Approaches Including Content Analysis, Statistical Modeling, and Computational Methods 8. How Will the Data Be Analyzed? Part Two: Qualitative Approaches including Thematic, Narrative, Conversation, and Discourse Analysis 9. Have We Found What We Were Looking For? Revisiting the Research Design Framework