Analyzing YouTube Content: Methodological Considerations for Technical Communication Research

The YouTube platform plays a vital role in contemporary technical communication as a central warehouse of technical instructions. Though several studies have explored the importance of specific videos, creators, and communities, it is also necessary to study the platform with a wider, data-driven lens in order to consider rhetorical strategies across channels and communities. But while this relationship between close and distant reading has been applied successfully to text-focused platforms, YouTube's multimodality leads to challenges of scale and categorization for researchers taking a data-driven approach. This paper presents methodological insights from a study sampling and analyzing 300 YouTube videos. The authors reflect on the methodological challenges and propose potential solutions.