Four Styles of Quali-Quantitative Analysis: Making sense of the new Nordic food movement on the web

Abstract

Through the example of a web corpus built to study the emergence of the New Nordic Food phenomenon in Scandinavia, I discuss how quali-quantitative analysis can help us make sense of onlife traces. I propose four styles of analysis that address the meaning problem in different ways, namely 1) through complementarity, a division of labour in which quantitative and qualitative methods are allowed to unfold relatively undisturbed by one another, the latter performing the job of situating and interpreting the insights gleaned from the former; 2) through a single level of analysis, whereby the potential of onlife traces is seen to reside in their ability to be both qualitatively rich and quantifiable at the same time, enabling an analysis of how apparent macro phenomena are produced on the micro level; 3) through curation, a critical practice in which a qualitative understanding of different media environments and their effects on the production of onlife traces becomes integral to the way in which such data should be sourced and quantified; and 4) through algorithmic sensemaking, whereby the relational reasoning typically associated with qualitative fieldwork is emulated quantitatively through techniques like pattern recognition.

Keywords

• digital methods
• mixed methods
• ethnography
• big data
• sensemaking