Large data and small stories: A triangulation approach to evaluating digital diplomacy

This article outlines how data-driven and computational methods can be integrated with traditional forms of discourse and linguistic analysis to examine and evaluate online public diplomacy activities (‘digital diplomacy’) and the publics’ engagement with these artefacts. Combined with reviews of strategy and policy documents, the three techniques – large data, small stories and policy analysis – offer a triangulation of combined approaches to create a rigorous approach to evaluation. We aim to provide an adaptable methodological template for replicable studies, with the underlying premise being that combining three lines of inquiry – document review, large data sets and computational analyses, and close, contextual reading – can triangulate to produce nuanced, robust evaluations with both granularity and generalisability. If, as one UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) report argues, evaluation efforts can seem “like a forester going out to measure how fast his trees have grown overnight without a ruler” (Vitner and Knox in Engagement: Public diplomacy in a globalised world. UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, London, 2008), in our triangulated approach, one line of analysis uses distant reading to map the ‘forest’, another uses close reading to examine the ‘trees’, and a third references policy and strategy to determine the seemingly absent ‘ruler’.