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Paper short abstract

How can qualitative inquiry remain reflexive when working with algorithms, archives, and AI outputs? The Extended Digital Case Method treats non-human informants as generative analytics partners while centering researcher judgment to preserve contextual integrity when interpreting digital outputs.

Paper long abstract

How can qualitative inquiry remain reflexive when informants include non-human actors such as algorithms, archives, and AI outputs? This paper develops the Extended Digital Case Method (EDCM), a conceptual framework that positions digital actors as methodologically consequential “non-human informants” rather than substitutes for immersion. Building on Michael Burawoy’s extended case method, which emphasizes theory reconstruction through empirical anomalies, the EDCM adapts reflexive ethnography to the epistemic and methodological challenges of digitally-mediated fields. Platform governance, temporal persistence, and high-volume interactions complicate access, participation, and interpretation, while computational tools risk abstracting social relations from context.

The EDCM addresses these challenges by integrating digital tools–APIs, archives, and small language models–as extensions of reflexive practice. The researcher remains the accountable agent, using these tools to surface anomalies, extend temporal observation, and interrogate deviations while preserving interpretive fidelity to situated social practices. By combining sustained participant observation with selective digital augmentation, the EDCM operationalizes pre-digital principles in post-digital settings: adequacy for scope, contextual sensitivity for depth, and iterative engagement through repeated analysis for validity. Computational outputs function as generative informants whose contributions are interpreted and reintegrated through human judgment.

Illustrated through a digital ethnography of r/Antiwork, a 2.9M-member Reddit community focused on labor critique, the EDCM reveals minority perspectives, platform-mediated governance, and interactional divergences that challenge traditional labor and social movement theories. More broadly, it demonstrates how qualitative inquiry can maintain analytical rigor, accountability, and theory-generative potential as human and computational actors jointly shape social knowledge, situating post-digital methods within a lineage of reflexive ethnography.