Caring as Critical Proximity: A Call for Toolmaking in Digital Migration Studies

The field of digital methods has emerged over the past two decades at the interface between media studies, science and technology studies (STS), computer science, and information design (Marres 2017; Rogers 2013). The core questions and ambitions covered closely resemble the kind of digital migration studies presented in this book. First, a commitment to studying wider sociocultural phenomena on, through, and with digital traces from online media. Second, a desire to critically engage with the role of these media, their platforms, and algorithms as infrastructures of social life. Third, a curiosity about how to wrongfoot entrenched divides between offline and online, actual and virtual, or qualitative and quantitative. And finally, ongoing experimentation with computational techniques for large-scale data capture analysis in conjunction with ethnographic approaches to deep sensemaking and interpretation. Indeed, to begin