From Spurling, N. and Kuijer, L. (2016) Everyday Futures. Institute for Social Futures: Lancaster http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/everydayfutures/essay-collection/ Please use the following format if you wish to cite this essay: Timan, T. and Ellsworth-Krebs, K. (2016) Going Digital: Attempting to Bring Digital Tools to The Study of Everyday Home Life. In: Spurling N. and Kuijer, L. (Eds) Everyday Futures. Lancaster: Institute for Social Futures. http://wp.lancs.ac.uk/everydayfutures/essay-collection/, pp.41-52. Going Digital: Attempting to Bring Digital Tools to the Study of Everyday Home Life Tjerk Timan (Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology and Society (TILT), Tilburg University, Netherlands) t.timan@uvt.nl Katherine Ellsworth-Krebs (Centre for Housing Research, School of Geography and Geosciences, University of St Andrews, Scotland) ke68@st-andrews.ac.uk Abstract In uncovering everyday futures, the Internet is a potentially vital place to investigate the experiences and expectation of home life. The home is a key site to understand and intervene in futures-in-the-making, being a critical space of consumption and a place in which everyday practices and norms are (re)produced. Notably, online methods allow a window into the privacy of the home (i.e. written and visual media) and ease the process of data collection for cross-cultural comparisons. We explore the utility of home improvement forums for understanding expectations of (near) future homes, comparing desired futures by householders in the Netherlands and UK. Importantly, this paper offers a methodological reflection of innovative online methods for studying everyday futures. Discovering Everyday Futures of the Home To interrogate and explore everyday future imaginaries, the Everyday Futures workshop in July 2016 drew together an international group of scholars. From this event the home emerged as a common area of interest between participants and this has become the context of this short essay. The home serves both as a specific place, or context where futures are imagined and made, and as a subject of futures – the home as a changing fluid concept that is both physical (a location, a building) and an idea (a sense of belonging, comfort and privacy). To contribute to understanding everyday future homes we decided to investigate what home improvement forums could reveal about householders expectations or desires for their (near) future homes. We capitalize on the international composition of the Everyday Futures Network by doing a cross- cultural comparison between the Netherlands and UK. Certainly, previous cross-cultural comparisons on the home (Wilhite et al., 1996; Ozaki, 2002) have demonstrated how taken-for-granted norms in one country can become more visible when contrasted with another culture’s norms. The novelty of the approach in this paper lies in using online methods to make a cross-cultural comparison of key home improvement themes. This has resulted in this short essay being primarily a reflection on the potential of using online methods to study everyday home life. We introduce some of the key debates related to the use of online methods (Section 2) and explain in detail how we used a few digital research tools to make a comparison of home improvement forums (Section 3). Section 4 presents our results and a limited discussion reflecting on our use of online methods in the cross- cultural comparison. Online and Natively Digital Methods Considering that searching peer-reviewed journals and looking up key terms are now general uses of the Internet, we argue that this short essay is broadly of relevance to the majority of academics. For instance, it is unsurprising to point out that there is nothing organic about search results and we all might benefit from learning more about understanding ‘Google effects’ and how to structure keyword searches (e.g. the impact and difference between using ‘, “, and [ ]). Indeed, there is quite a bit of advice about ‘search as research’, with two key preparatory steps being to set up a ‘research browser’ (e.g. clear cookies, disentangle yourself from Google) and understand (default) Google settings (e.g. search within city not country). There is also