oa Computational research in media studies: Methodological implicationsThis article has greatly benefited from the feedback provided on the first draft by José van Dijck, Jasmijn van Gorp, Thomas Poell and the anonymous reviewer, for which I kindly thank them.

Summary

The growing availability of historical media-related data and sources in digital form, and the development of tools for searching, analyzing, and visualizing them, provide promising new avenues for media studies research. But the uptake of these data and tools in mainstream media studies is still rather modest. The author argues that exploiting the advantages of computational research is necessary because scholars are already using digital data and tools, and because they will be disadvantaged if they do not critically engage with them. Computational media research requires increased methodological awareness and an improved transparency and responsiveness of data and tools.