Below is a summary of the methodology carried out to develop this project:

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• Social Listening: Employed Indiana University’s OSoMe suite of social media scraping tools to track the social conversation around the "Shoot" dance.

• Social Networking Analysis: Used Nvivo conducted a social networking analysis of the social structures that contributed to the spread of the "Shoot" dance.

• Content Analysis: Conducted a content analysis of news articles written about the trend to help fill in any gaps not captured by social media scraping. This allowed me to verify moments I found on social media against how people like BlocBoy JB himself talked about the dance in media interviews. 

• Search Trends: Layered in Google Search results to connect the major moments I uncovered with how people were searching of terms related to the "Shoot" dance which also allowed me to identity key peaks in conversation that extended beyond social media. 

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There are many moving parts to the spread of a trend that starts on social media. When proposing this project, I understood that the moments that supported the growth and spread of the "Shoot" dance did not happen in silos or only on social media. As you'll later see in the "Shoot Thru Time," section, the growth of this viral trend was not linear, nor did it happen in a quick-spurt of time such as other trends like the "In My Feelings Challenge" started by Shiggy, an online personality, did. The popularity of the "Shoot" dance grew fairly slowly starting in Summer 2017 before it peaked in Spring 2018. I took into consideration that trends originating on social media can easily find themselves be replicated in mediums outside of social media such as broadcast television and video games and tried to capture these occurrences whenever possible. While I sought to gather the major moments that fueled the growth and spread of the "Shoot" dance, this project should not be considered as an exhaustive history of this trend because there are, of course, micro-moments in the growth of a trend, that cannot be tracked by digital means. 

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*Note: All research methods listed above focused on moments that occurred between 07/01/17 - 11/01/18. 

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