ABSTRACT
This chapter provides YouTube as a platform, exploring both the possibilities of the platform as an object of study itself and more particularly the implications of attempting to use YouTube as a mechanism to explore other areas of social, cultural, and political practice. It outlines an approach toward the nature of YouTube as a data resource, one informed by the intersection of critical data studies and software studies. While YouTube is somewhat atypical in terms of its ease of use as a data resource for audience research, examining it in this way also provides insight into the broader opportunities and challenges for research practices involving other parts of the digital ecosystem. Building from earlier work questioning the nature of Big Data and claims made for its findings, and calls for a critical reflexivity toward Big Data methodologies, critical data studies argues that Responsibility for maintaining credibility of the ecosystem as a whole also resides with academics.
