Reading: Virtual Methods

There’s a really great little chapter called “Sociable Hyperlinks: an Ethnographic Approach to Connectivity” by Anne Beaulieu in the book Virtual Methods where she suggests (among other things) that a qualitative reading of links could consider the temporality of the link –”Some hyperlinks have a more ‘temporary’ prominence than others” p. 189 and the link’s level of specificity, that is, how deep the link points into the site. Also, in the case she describes there was an interesting “infrastructure” link where one database automatically pointed to another. Maybe this is something that’s been out there that’s just new to me, but I can’t say I’ve seen a hyperlink study that really takes any of these dimensions into the analysis, other than to cut out certain categories of links.