Beyond digital dualism: modeling digital community

This chapter develops a conceptual model through which to characterize the environmental niche of a digital community. The contribution of this model is in its potential to assist research into communities which occur across open social structures that are globally distributed and technologically mediated. These structural characteristics make new forms of digital community partially invisible to conventional methodological approaches and commonly deployed concepts of place and social engagement within community studies. The model proposed is derived from mixed-methods research into a real-world community (Maddox 2015) and offers a framework of data intersections that connect individual actions to the environmental imprint of a digital community. This approach seeks to characterize community through a derived approach rather than deploying ascribed criteria, as is common within community studies. From this model there are two, if not more, possible and interrelated applications. The first and most applied aspect of this model is its capacity to assist in the triangulation of insights derived from quantitative and qualitative research methods. The second and more speculative application of the data model presented in this chapter is its capacity to be deployed as a conceptual bridge through which to structure and aggregate information from multiple data sources, particularly with reference to big data. When applied to anonymized digital trace data, this approach may assist in identifying the digital imprint of communities through its focus upon describing emergent social forms.