Between Text and Context: Innovative approaches to the qualitative analysis of online data

Such an understanding is what we miss while analyzing online data, which are mostly text based and for which we often lack context. While we can read all the posts on a forum, and while we can access them “forever, " we are at the same time missing a lot of important elements regarding the posters’ identities, moods, and environments, as the famous New Yorker cartoon “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”1 reminds us. This lack of information is what we call the contextual challenge. The question for researchers studying online phenomena then becomes: How can one provide thick descriptions of the social world by studying text-based online interactions?.