Her first book, Life Online: Researching real experience in virtual space, was published in 1998, which reviewers called "a definitive sociological study of what it's like to be on the net"[5] and "a bold move in the exponentially increasingly field of internet studies....that allows the reader to appreciate the challenges of applying contemporary ethnographic methods to online populations.

[7] In 2020, Markham and coauthor Katrin Tiidenberg published a followup to Life Online in the form of a curated collection involving 30 contributors, titled Metaphors of Internet: Ways of being in the age of Ubiquity.

[10] Markham's arguments around qualitative methods focus on the importance of context sensitivity, flexible adaptation, and reflexivity.

These concepts have been foundational for developing conceptual frameworks for innovative approaches to fieldwork,[11] methods for online interviewing,[12] or reflexivity in data science[13] Markham is cited as a key figure and 'recommended reading' for researching digital contexts in textbooks and handbooks on qualitative research practice.

[14][15][16][17] Markham maintains a blog about a range of conceptual and pragmatic issues related to lived experience in 21st Century contexts of complexity at https://annettemarkham.com.