More human geographers could benefit from analyzing blogs as a method in their research. Blogs are time capsules of data that can provide incredibly useful and otherwise potentially unattainable snapshots of the author’s thoughts and opinions at a specific point in time. This article draws empirically on a recent research project where blogs acted as caches of information that provided two main benefits. First, blogs were effective as preliminary sources for the array and quality of historical data stored in the blogs, helping to follow historical pathways and ensuring strong preliminary data that shaped further data collection. Second, blogs supplied accurate and detailed information that could be directly cited in the research and otherwise proved difficult to find on the opinions and motives of actors at that time, providing unique insights into their behaviors and consequent impacts on the economic landscape. Although not without limitations, blog analysis offers many potential benefits for human geographers and this article provides insights into how they can be obtained.

更多的人文地理学家可以从将博客分析作为他们研究的一种方法中受益。博客是数据的时间胶囊，可以提供作者在特定时间点的想法和观点的非常有用的快照，否则可能无法实现。本文以经验为基础借鉴了最近的一个研究项目，在该项目中，博客充当了提供两个主要好处的信息缓存。首先，博客作为存储在博客中的历史数据的阵列和质量的初步来源是有效的，有助于跟踪历史路径并确保形成进一步数据收集的强有力的初步数据。其次，博客提供了准确详细的信息，可以直接在研究中引用，否则很难找到当时演员的意见和动机，为他们的行为及其对经济格局的影响提供独特的见解。尽管并非没有限制，博客分析为人文地理学家提供了许多潜在的好处，本文提供了如何获得这些好处的见解。