Much research has focused on the link structure between documents. Bibliometrics utilizes quantitative analysis and statistics to describe patterns of publication within a given field or body of literature. Citation indexes such as the Social Science Citation Index have been used to suggest prominent literature and individuals in a field. In recent years, a new growth area in bibliometrics has been on analyzing web hyperlinks. For example, Google uses hyperlink structure to determine the ranking of search results.Mining web navigations for intelligence.
While hyperlinks are static links contained in documents, web navigations are dynamic, being based on people’s online behavior. In addition to being useful for studying the structure of a document collection, navigation data can be used to study people’s online activities. Navigation patterns can be studied for either an individual or a group. Navigation patterns can also be studied for certain periods of time, over which trends can be identified.
From an analysis perspective, both hyperlinks and navigations can be represented by link matrices with outgoing/start documents as rows and incoming/destination document as columns. In hyperlink analysis, the values in the matrix are either 0 or 1, as two documents are either linked or unlinked. In navigation analysis, links between documents are weighted by the frequency of navigation. In this sense, navigation data are richer than hyperlinks.

Resulta complicado concluir un artículo que aborda un proceso en marcha e ir más allá de las tendencias enunciadas previamente. No obstante, constatamos cómo “lo digital” es un territorio de interés creciente para las marcas y para la Investigación de Mercado, y en los próximos años veremos una consolidación de la investigación cualitativa online en términos de cuota de mercado (aunque mantendrá su carácter minoritario, frente a las cifras de la investigación cuantitativa).
Por otro lado, y al igual que sucedió en el cuantitativo online, veremos cómo crece el pull de empresas proveedoras de servicios cualitativos. Pensamos en plataformas desarrolladas de forma específica para la investigación y que vayan más allá de las funcionalidades diseñadas desde cliente.
Y, por último, desde la academia y desde la empresa se abre un reto para trabajar en la fundamentación teórica de estas metodologías. Un reto para el que este artículo espera ser un pequeño grano de arena.

No es pues el análisis del discurso una técnica menos invasiva de las realidades sociales. Pero frente a otras opciones de investigación cualitativa, en el caso de su aplicación por ejemplo a la etnografía digital, sí permite modular la intervención y conseguir la autorización y la orientación de los comunicantes. No sólo como fedatarios y observados pasivos, sino además como co-autores, co-investigadores, tal como la red quiere considerar a sus usuarios más activos.
El desplazamiento de los perfiles, los roles o papeles sociales se puede llegar a considerar acelerado y en parte debido a la inmersión tecnológica. Pero llevamos décadas de renovación institucional y un creciente roce e hibridación de culturas contemporáneas que las prácticas digitales confirman y amplifican. Hasta la misma renovación universitaria del Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior sólo es posible con un incremento de la tecnificación educativa. Universalizar un sistema de formación por competencias implica aceptar la transformación de las profesiones y acondicionar el sistema formativo para seguir sus cambios. El aprendizaje realza el protagonismo del que aprende. ¿No es posible que nos encontremos en un proceso paralelo o parecido de
renovación de la investigación de sus instituciones de las revistas académicas y de sus grupos departamentales?

(…) para una mayoría de usuarios, también entre investigadores, la tecnología es un constante reto de actualización, que particularmente en la docencia y en la investigación universitaria no siempre cuenta con defensores mayoritarios por las intermediaciones y filtros que periódica o incluso frecuentemente obligan a renovar. Silverstone señalaba varias fases de domesticación de la tecnología. A los investigadores debe exigírseles cuando menos la fase de apropiación (en Storey, 2003, pp. 165-166) en la secuencia teórica del consumo: producción comercial (commodification), imaginación, apropiación, objetivación, incorporación y conversión).

No method inherently produces “exactly right” results. Only researchers who understand the applications and limitations of the methods they are using, who have insight into their data, and who think rigorously, can produce good research.

[conclusiones a la contextualización de la investigación de comunicación, fragmento en G Books]

The authors have located definitions of “discourse” used in previous studies within two spheres. First, “discourse” as a noun, “a thing in and of itself.” For instance, “discourse as text, discourse as language-in-use, discourse as identity and discourse as truth, rationality and common sense.”

Alternatively and less prominently, “discourse” is used as a verb, primarily to “challenge actions that people and institutions take in response to each other and more specifically, actions done with language and other semiotic systems in order to create, recreate, change and maintain identities, roles and social contexts that people live within (and without).” (…)
A seminal idea introduced in On Discourse Analysis in Classrooms is the notion of “laminating,” the integration and layering-in of definitions and insights from other studies. “A lamination bonds together a series of layers in such a way that each remains unrecognizable but together may be stronger and put to new uses.” While maintaining the integrity of the individual study, the lamination process allows for the emergence of something new as a result of how the studies inform each other. (…)
“Discourse analysis is less a methodology than a set of ways of ‘seeing’ language and literacy events in classrooms.” The authors identify four frames that are essential building blocks in discourse analysis studies:
+ The linguistic turn in social sciences
+The foregrounding of local events and their relationships to broader cultural and social processes (i.e. micro- and macro-level approaches)
+ Recognition of the importance of social and historical contexts
+ Recognition that discourse processes always involve power relations.

In addition, the analysis would have to take interactivity into account, not only as a matter of principle, so as to do justice to the rich affordances of the medium, but also because of the social significance that the exploitation of these affordances may have for a particular social practice. In the case of the government’s ‘benefit fraud’ campaign, for example, visitors to the website are encouraged to ‘report a cheat’ by filling in a detailed online form. The interactive potential of the medium is thus harnessed to what seems like an invidious perversion of e-government.

Furthermore, the unique semiotic potential of the web creates new challenges for the analysis of multimodality (Lemke, 2002). To return briefly to my earlier snapshots of higher education discourse, universities can now be seen to use not only colourful graphics on their websites, but also sound and movement.
(…)
The methodological challenge involved is compounded when it is not only the multimodality of web communication itself that is at issue, but its complex links with other media. This is the case with the world-wide cross-media franchises discussed by Lemke (2004), who proposes to extend CDA in the direction of a ‘multiplicative, heteroglossic model of meaning effects across media’.
Clearly, web technology has significantly extended the discursive repertoire available, allowing new modes of representation as well as the construction of new identities and relationships in ‘parallel social realities’ (Lemke, 2004). To expect these to feature prominently in every CDA project would be as unrealistic as it would be misguided. However, complex online multimodalities should at least be considered as possible areas of investigation when research questions are formulated, methods developed, and project designs drawn up.