Digitizing »Digital Methods« The Journey of a Research Domain from a Book into the Semantic Web

Abstract

This paper introduces an approach to classification and formalization of interdisciplinary social research with the web. The research project built upon an initial arraying work of Richard Rogers that introduced digital methods as a new form of research with the web as a source of perceptions about society [1]. Our work formalized the digital methods domain by construing an ontology with help of the Web Ontology Language (OWL), and interpreted the resulting representation for universal perceptions about web-based social research, such as the identification of accumulations of research activities, and predictions about epistemological shifts in the future.