Development of methodologies for researching online: the case of food blogs

The expanding reach of the Internet has opened new sites for conducting social science research. More recently, attention has been given to weblogs – or blogs, as they are more commonly known – as a generative data resource. Blogs are a contemporary digital authoring platform widely kept and read across different social and cultural groups for a range of different purposes. They have become a significant aspect of online engagements; their widespread adoption has been attributed to user-friendly template designs in free access blogging platforms.

In this paper, we explicate on our combined multimodal social semiotic, ethnographic and narrative methods to provide a more encompassing approach: one that is able to attend to the unique, online material, which might not be wholly illuminated by any one of the three methodologies used independently. This involves coming to terms with the different epistemological perspectives that guide and shape the cross-disciplinary collaboration. We explain the framework we developed and the research processes, including data sampling, collection, archival and analysis; provide an overview of key findings from the substantive focus of this project; discuss the overall possibilities and constraints of working with combined perspectives; as well as offer suggestions for future online research in blogging platforms.