The above literature has been diversifying of late in the wake of previous decades’ focus on interdisciplinary methods, literary turns, postcolonial, feminist and poststructuralist critiques in the social sciences, borrowing heavily from the humanities in doing so. Another, more recent impact on methods texts is the impact of ‘new technologies’ or ‘new media’; information and communication technologies (ICTs), the internet, the web, and automated data-gathering and analytical tools, and electronic database. This time-sensitive and growing literature roughly corresponds in terms of the tripartite division outlined so far; how-to books, discipline-based, or more abstract methodological exegeses.
All aim to guide research students through what is an emergent terrain circumscribed by various digital media (the web, ‘social media’, mobile communications devices, and older computer-mediated communications like email and discussion forums), the impact of ICTs on conventional research practices (automated research tools, web-mapping and data-mining software for searching the web, general-purpose search engines), and even new notions of the research field (virtual or cyberspatial domains), research subjects and topics (avatars to computer games, to simulations), to specific sorts of internet-based research tools and digitalized research techniques. Not only have these developments re-opened older methodological debates, but they have also upped the ante here in terms of the appropriate role, added value, and scientific status of the internet, ICTs, virtuality, and other mediated fieldwork scenarios in academe.