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The purpose of this paper is to introduce Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset, a toolset for capturing and analyzing Twitter data. Instead of just presenting a technical paper detailing the system, however, the authors argue that the type of data used for, as well as the methods encoded in, computational systems have epistemological repercussions for research. The authors thus aim at situating the development of the toolset in relation to methodological debates in the social sciences and humanities.

The authors review the possibilities and limitations of existing approaches to capture and analyze Twitter data in order to address the various ways in which computational systems frame research. The authors then introduce the open-source toolset and put forward an approach that embraces methodological diversity and epistemological plurality.

The authors find that design decisions and more general methodological reasoning can and should go hand in hand when building tools for computational social science or digital humanities.

Besides methodological transparency, the software provides robust and reproducible data capture and analysis, and interlinks with existing analytical software. Epistemic plurality is emphasized by taking into account how Twitter structures information, by allowing for a number of different sampling techniques, by enabling a variety of analytical approaches or paradigms, and by facilitating work at the micro, meso, and macro levels.

The paper opens up critical debate by connecting tool design to fundamental interrogations of methodology and its repercussions for the production of knowledge. The design of the software is inspired by exchanges and debates with scholars from a variety of disciplines and the attempt to propose a flexible and extensible tool that accommodates a wide array of methodological approaches is directly motivated by the desire to keep computational work open for various epistemic sensibilities.

To suggest methods and approaches to the study of relationships between the blogsphere and news, and to show, through a preliminary study, how the blogsphere makes particular political contributions through the manner in which social issues are discussed.

The article provides a set of research questions as well as general methodological approaches to undertake empirical, comparative analysis of the blogsphere and news. It reports on a preliminary study of the contribution of the blogsphere to politics using semantic analysis. Hyperlink analysis of the right‐of‐center US political blogsphere is also provided in a figure.

It was found that the contribution of the blogsphere to political issue formation is distinctive from that of the news, for the blogsphere provides to issues a poignancy not found in the news.

The reported study is suggestive of a particular contribution the blogsphere may make to issue formation.

The article outlines a research agenda.

The article seeks to reorient the study of the blogsphere.

This paper, based on a publication entitled Facing up to the Learning Organisation Challenge, published in April 2003, provides an overview of the main questions emerging from recent European research projects related to the topic of the learning organisation. The rationale for focusing on this topic is the belief that the European Union goals related to “lifelong learning” and the creation of a “knowledge‐based society” can only be attained if the organisations in which people work are also organisations in which they learn. Work organisations must become, at the same time, learning organisations. This paper has four main messages. The first is that, in order to build learning organisations, one has to ensure that: there is coherence between the “tangible” (formal/objective) and the “intangible” (informal/subjective) dimensions of an organisation; and that the organisation's learning goals are reconciled with individuals’ learning needs. The complexity involved in ensuring the right balance between these different dimensions, means that in the final analysis one cannot realistically expect more than incomplete or imperfect learning organisations. However, this does not in any way negate the validity of the quest to reconcile these competing but “real” interests. The second message is that challenging or developmental work is a prerequisite for implementing a learning organisation. One of the keys to promoting learning organisations is to organise work in such a way that it promotes human development. The third message is that the provision of support and guidance is essential to ensure that developmental work does in fact provide opportunities for developmental learning. The fourth message is that to address organisational learning there is a need for boundary‐crossing and interdisciplinary partnerships between the vocational education and training and human resource development communities.