Ethnography Matters

Heather Ford

Editor’s Note: This month’s Stories to Action edition starts off with Heather Ford’s @hfordsa’s story on her experience of watching a story unfold on Wikipedia and in person. While working as an ethnographer at Ushahidi, Heather was in Nairobi, Kenya when she heard news of Kenya’s army invading Somolia. She found out that the article about this story was being nominated for deletion on Wikipedia because it didn’t meet the encyclopedia’s “notability” criteria. This local story became a way for Heather to understand why there was a disconnect between what Wikipedia editors and Kenyans recognised as “notable”. She argues that, although Wikipedia frowns on using social media as sources, the “word on the street” can be an important way for editors to find out what is really happening and how important the story is when it first comes out. She also talks about how her ethnographic work helped her develop insights for a report that Ushahidi would use in their plans to develop new tools for rapid real-time events. 

Heather shared this story at Microsoft’s annual Social Computing Symposium organized by Lily Cheng at NYU’s ITP. Watch the video of her talk, in which she refers to changing her mind on an article she wrote a few years ago, The Missing Wikipedians.

________________________________________________________________

A few of us were on a panel at Microsoft’s annual Social Computing Symposium led by the inimitable Tricia Wang. In an effort to reach across academic (and maybe culture) divides, Tricia urged us to spend five minutes telling a single story and what that experience made us realize about the project we were working on. It was a wonderful way of highlighting the ethnographic principle of reflexivity where the ethnographer reflects on their attitudes/thoughts/reactions in response to the experiences that they have in the field. I told this story about the misunderstandings faced by editors across geographical and cultural divides, and how I’ve come to understand Articles for Deletions (AFDs) on Wikipedia that are related to Kenya. I’ve also added thoughts that I had after the talk/conference based on what I learned here.   

In November, 2011, I arrived in Nairobi for a visit to the HQ of Ushahidi and to conduct interviews about a project I was involved with to understand how Wikipedians managed sources during rapidly evolving news events. We were trying to figure out how to build tools to help people who collaboratively curate stories about such events – especially when they are physically distant from one another. When I arrived in Nairobi, I went straight to the local supermarket and bought copies of every local newspaper. It was a big news day in the country because of reports that the Kenyan army had invaded Southern Somalia to try and root out the militant Al Shabaab terrorist group. The newspapers all showed Kenyan military tanks and other scenes from the offensive, matched by the kind of bold headlines that characterize national war coverage the world over.

A quick search on Wikipedia, and I noticed that a page had been created but that it had been nominated for deletion on the grounds that did not meet Wikipedia’s notability criteria. The nominator noted that the event was not being reported as an “invasion” but rather an “incursion” and that it was “routine” for troops from neighboring countries to cross the border for military operations. Read More…

Below is a full list of the posts for our first edition of a monthly collection. Thank you so much to our amazing guest contributors and to contributing editors who helped out!

‘Open window’ by Sharon Hall Shipp. CC-BY-NC on Flickr

Editorial by Heather Ford, 7 February, 2013

The ethics of openness: How informed is “informed consent”? by Rachelle Annechino, 1 March, 2013

#GoOpenAccess for the Ethnography Matters Community by Jenna Burrell, 27 January, 2013

Designing for Stories: Working with Homeless Youth in Boyle Heights by Jeff Hall, Elizabeth Gin and An Xiao Mina, 27 February, 2013

On Legitimacy, Place and the Anthropology of the Internet by Sarah Kendzior, 13 February, 2013

YouTube “video tags” as an open survey tool by Juliano Spyer, 21 February, 2013

This month, we begin with a timely conversation on openness in the ethnographic research community, highlighting some of the many facets of this principle for ethnographers, especially those who study online communities. Jenna Burrell has also written a post that has attracted great feedback on open access journals for the ethnography research community so be sure to check that out if you’re interested in how to make your published work more accessible. 

For the next months’ themes, please see the calendar and contact us with your proposed post. We’d love to hear from you!

________________________________________________________________________

On Saturday the 12th of January, almost a month ago, I woke to news of Aaron Swartz’s death the previous day. In the days that followed, I experienced the mixed emotions that accompany such horrific moments: sadness for him and the pain he must have gone through in struggling with depression and anxiety, anger at those who had waged an exaggerated legal campaign against him, uncertainty as I posted about his death on Facebook and felt like I was trying to claim some part of him and his story, and finally resolution that I needed to clarify my own policy on open access.

I had worked passionately for open access in my previous life, helping educational institutions and foundations design open access policy, pushing for open government data and railing against those who didn’t ‘get’ why closing access to publicly-funded information was outdated and unsustainable. But nearing the end of my work with Creative Commons and its international offshoot, iCommons, I became jaded by the internal politics of the open content movement, and embarrassed by my previous zealousness. I started to realize that open access was definitely not revolutionising access to education in the majority of the world, and that the passion that myself and others had felt about pushing forward the openness agenda was becoming sinister as any criticism was met with aggressive denial, as definitions of openness became ever narrower and technologically defined, and as we seemed to get further and further from the goals that we started with.

Image by Torley on Flickr. CC BY SA

In the wake of Aaron’s death, and the renewed calls by the open access community for academics to take a stand, I felt that I needed to resolve these feelings and to define my own perspective on the issue. Thinking about the openness of your research can be like going down a rabbit hole because if you’re attempting maximum accessibility for all people at all times, any open access policy looks incomplete. Open access definitions tend to be restricted to a particular medium (digital, online) and a particular definition of free (free of charge and free from most copyright licensing conditions) (see Peter Suber’s great introduction to open access here). Read More…

Starting February 2013, Ethnography Matters is starting a thematic monthly enquiry led by each of our team members. Be sure to contact us if you’re interested in contributing to any of these editions!

February 2013 edited by Heather Ford: The Openness Edition

March 2013 edited by Tricia Wang: “Stories to insights to action!” The role of narrative in ethnographic practice

April 2013 edited by Nicolas Nova: Ethnomining: Combining qualitative and quantitative data

May 2013 edited by Jenna Burrell: How to talk to companies and organisations about ethnographic fieldwork

June 2013 edited by Rachelle Annechino: Pseudonyms and pseudonymity

Photo by Joe Lanman CC BY on Flickr

Culture close-up by biomedical scientist, Nathan Reading on Flickr (CC BY)

Last month’s Wired magazine showed an infographic with a headline that read: ‘History’s most influential people, ranked by Wikipedia reach’ with a group of 20 men arranged in hierarchical order — from Jesus at number 1 to Stalin at number 20. Curious, I wondered how ‘influence’ and ‘Wikipedia reach’ was being decided. According to the article, ‘Rankings (were) based on parameters such as the number of language editions in which that person has a page, and the number of people known to speak those languages’. What really surprised me was not the particular arrangement of figures on this page but the conclusions that were being drawn from it.

According to the piece, César Hidalgo, head of the Media Lab’s Macro Connections group, who researched the data, made the following claims about the data gathered from Wikipedia:

a) “It shows you how the world perceives your own national culture.“

b) “It’s a socio-cultural mirror.“

c) “We use historical characters as proxies for culture.“

And finally, perhaps most surprising is this final line in the story:

Using this quantitative approach, Hidalgo is now testing hypotheses such as whether cultural development is structured or random. “Can you have a Steve Jobs in a country that has not generated enough science or technology?” he wonders. “Ultimately we want to know how culture assembles itself.”

It is difficult to comment on the particular method used by this study because there is little more than the diagram and a few paragraphs of analysis, and the journalist may have misquoted him, but I wanted to draw attention to the statements being made because I think it represents the growing phenomenon of big data analysts using Wikipedia data to make assumptions about ‘culture’. Read More…

This month we celebrate Ethnographymatter’s first year with a bumper edition of features about ethnographic practice in the world, as well as some exciting news about the growth of our team!

Tricia Wang writes a reflection of the past year at Ethnography Matters, covering some of the more remarkable discussions over the year as we’ve grown into a “community of mavericks whose curiosity about and commitment to ethnography have ignited discussions about ethnography outside of formal institutions”. Rachelle Annechino tells us the “love story of two ethnographers” by letting us in on her chats with Judd and Tamar Antin about their work as research scientists studying motivation and public health narratives.

We’re really lucky to have two guest contributors this month. Wendy Hsu writes about the software that she built to gather more qualitative data for her research on independent rock musicians, and Erik Bigras shares the story of The Asthma Files, a project to understand the contested space of asthma research.

This month also sees the launch of the Ethnomatters Book Club #ethnobookclub with a conversation about what struck readers as important or interesting about Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ book, ‘Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil’.

We’d love you to contribute to the discussion, so feel free to head on over to the group or contribute your ideas on the blog or anywhere else using the #ethnobookclub tag. We’re also hoping to see a few face-to-face book clubs emerging and feeding into the virtual conversation in the new year so let us know if you’re interested in starting one in your city!

Last, but certainly not least, to celebrate our one-year anniversary we’re very excited to announce that Nicolas Nova joins the team as a regular contributor. Nicolas has written several guest posts already for Ethnomatters and brings a great deal of experience in design research, interaction design and speculative applied ethnography. What’s more, Nicolas is based in Switzerland and works closely with design and corporate firms throughout Europe so we’re looking forward to him bringing a new community of European researchers to our conversation.

What a year it’s been! Here’s to even more fruitful, supportive conversations in the next

The Ethnomatters Team.

PS: Would you like to be our next guest contributor? Ethnography Matters is your space. You can feature a project/paper/book/syllabus, provide a fieldwork update, or share your thoughts. Here are some more ideas for how you can participate. We’d love to hear from you!

Announcements

• Today (19 November) Deadline for Microsoft Research Social Media Collective postdoctoral research applications. “This position is an ideal opportunity for a scholar whose work draws on anthropology, communication, media studies, sociology, and/or science and technology studies to bring empirical and critical perspectives to complex socio-technical issues.”
• 30 November Deadline for contributions to the December EthnoZine edition
• New blog The American Anthropological Association’s Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC) recently launched a new blog that ‘aims to promote dialogue on theories, tools, and social interactions that explore questions at the intersection of anthropology and science and technology studies.

Next month

• #ethnobookclub We’re not done with Death Without Weeping yet, but if you want to get a head start for our January book, we’re going to be reading ”Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae” by Michael Veal. Do order yours and join in on the second #ethnobookclub.
• Music ethnographer, Wendy Hsu will give us the second installment of her Digital Ethnography post. Did you read the first one, On Digital Ethnography: What computers have to do with ethnography? It generated a lot of comments, and we’d love to see yours!
• Erik Bigras from The Asthma Files, will give us the second installment on ethnographers are working with the medical community to collect shared data. Check out his first post,Innovation in Asthma Research: Using Ethnography to Study a Global Health Problem.
• Nicolas Nova, our new regular contributor will start off with his post on his new book,  Curious Rituals: Gestural Interaction in the Digital Everyday.

Yesterday I settled down with a cup of coffee at Blackwell’s book shop in Oxford to re-read the highlights that I’d made of the Kindle edition of our book club book of the month, Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ “Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil“. But, once again, I was drawn so completely into her really lucid, powerful writing about her role in the field of the alto that I found myself re-reading the chapter and thinking about how I might apply her approach in my own ethnographic work (or alternatively as where I might be a little more tenuous). I’m kicking off what we hope you might continue: picking a single paragraph that stood out for you the most and talking about what it means to you and your practice. Feel free to post in the comments section below or come on over to the mailing list where the team will be discussing the book with the incredible group of ethnographers who inhabit it. Also feel free to blog, Tweet and/or talk about the book in other places by using the tag #ethnobookclub as you come across interesting stuff! 

Situating my own work and the act of “witnessing” the experience of many Wikipedians in terms that Nancy Scheper-Hughes uses

“The field” in Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s book is the hillside favela above the plantation town of Bom Jesus de Mata in Northeastern Brazil. Scheper-Hughes returns to the village that she had worked in as a 20-year-old activist to try to understand why mothers do not treat the death of so many of their infants as a tragedy. During a period of 25 years, returning on and off to the village, Scheper-Hughes follows three generations of shantytown women in their struggles against starvation, sickness and death.

Scheper-Hughes says that her writing departs from traditional or classical ethnography in the way that the self, other, and scientific objectivity are handled, as well as how her own values and sympathies are made explicit, rather than “invisible” or hidden. She describes the role of the ethnographer as follows (my highlights):

The ethnographer, like the artist, is engaged in a special kind of vision quest through which a specific interpretation of the human condition, an entire sensibility, is forged. Our medium, our canvas, is “the field”, a place both proximate and intimate (because we have lived some part of our lives there) as well as forever distant and unknowably “other” (because our own destinies lie elsewhere). In the act of “writing culture,” what emerges is always a highly subjective, partial, and fragmentary – but also deeply felt and personal – record of human lives based on eyewitness and testimony. The act of witnessing is what lends our work its moral (at times its almost theological) character. So-called participant observation has a way of drawing the ethnographer into spaces of human life where she or he might really prefer not to go at all and once there doesn’t know how to go about getting out except through writing, which draws others there as well, making them party to the act of witnessing.

I love this paragraph for so many reasons, but the glimpse of answers to three important questions stand out for me: Read More…

On the first day of WikiSym last week, as we started preparing for the open space track and the crowd was being petitioned for new sessions over lunch, I suddenly thought that it might be a good idea for researchers who used ethnographic methods to get together to talk about the challenges we were facing and the successes we were having. So I took the mic and asked how many people used ethnographic methods in their research. After a few raised their hands, I announced that lunch would be spent talking about ethnography for those who were interested. Almost a dozen people – many of whom are big data analysts - came to listen and talk at a small Greek restaurant in the center of Linz. I was impressed that so many quantitative researchers came to listen and try to understand how they might integrate ethnographic methods into their research. It made me excited about the potential of ethnographic research methods in this community, but by the end of the conference, I was worried about the assumptions on which much of the research on Wikipedia is based, and at what this means for the way that we understand Wikipedia in the world. 

WikiSym (Wiki Symposium) is the annual meeting of researchers, practitioners and wiki engineers to talk about everything to do with wikis and open collaboration. Founded by the father of the wiki, Ward Cunningham and others, the conference started off as a place where wiki engineers would gather to advance the field. Seven years later, WikiSym is dominated by big data quantitative analyses of English Wikipedia.

Some participants were worried about the movement away from engineering topics (like designing better wiki platforms), while others were worried about the fact that Wikipedia (and its platform, MediaWiki) dominates the proceedings, leaving other equally valuable sites like Wikia and platforms like TikiWiki under-studied.

So, in the spirit of the times, I drew up a few rough analyses of papers presented.

(Wikipedia and its platform, MediaWiki are but one of a host of other wiki communities and platforms which is why I’ve distinguished between Wikipedia and others.)

It would be interesting to look at this for other years to see whether the recent Big Data trend is having an impact on Wikipedia research and whether research related to Wikipedia (rather than other open collaboration communities) is on the rise. One thing I did notice was that the demo track was a lot larger this year than the previous two years. Hopefully that is a good sign for the future because it is here that research is put into practice through the design of alternative tools. A good example is Jodi Schneider’s research on Wikipedia deletions that she then used to conceptualize alternative interfaces  that would simplify the process and help to ensure that each article would be dealt with more fairly.

Talking about ethnography?

I am still intrigued by the fact that so many quantitative analysts wanted to know about ethnography during our open space session. We started the session with those who had done ethnographic work talking about their experiences: Stuart Geiger talked about his ethnographic work on Wikipedia bots, Isis Amelie Hjorth talked about her ethnographic enquiry into Wreckamovie, the collaborative movie outfit from Finland and Paško Bilić discussed how he studied breaking news stories on Wikipedia. Others wanted to know how you even begin to do ethnographic research on Wikipedia when editors are a) anonymous and b) located all around the world. One participant said, “I’m faced with 3 million edits (in my dataset) and I have to say something about them. How do I even begin?” Read More…

The Ethnomatters team has been wanting to do a review of software tools for a while now but when we got down to writing them, we realized that there are already very comprehensive software reviews in places like the University of Surrey’s website. So we decided to rather compile short posts on the tools that each of us used in our last ethnographic project, highlighting what worked, what didn’t work and what we’re thinking of trying in the future. We’d love to hear from you about your own experiences so please feel free to add yours in the comments below for further reading!

For my latest project (“Understanding sources“), I needed to collect data from a really wide variety of sources. I had interview data, articles and papers from web, and then a multitude of Wikipedia talk pages, edits, history versions, related articles and image and video sources. For interviewing, I use my beautiful and incredibly trustworthy Zoom H2 audio recorder. I do my own transcriptions (as suggested by Jenna in order to get a really close understanding of the data) and for that I use ExpressScribe which seems to work pretty well. I like that you can use “hot keys” to stop and play and that the speed dial is in a good place for slowing down the dictation. Read More…

Almost a year ago, I was hired by Ushahidi to work as an ethnographic researcher on a project to understand how Wikipedians managed sources during breaking news events. Ushahidi cares a great deal about this kind of work because of a new project called SwiftRiver that seeks to collect and enable the collaborative curation of streams of data from the real time web about a particular issue or event. If another Haiti earthquake happened, for example, would there be a way for us to filter out the irrelevant, the misinformation and build a stream of relevant, meaningful and accurate content about what was happening for those who needed it? And on Wikipedia’s side, could the same tools be used to help editors curate a stream of relevant sources as a team rather than individuals?

Original designs for voting a source up or down in order to determine “veracity”

When we first started thinking about the problem of filtering the web, we naturally thought of a ranking system which would rank sources according to their reliability or veracity. The algorithm would consider a variety of variables involved in determining accuracy as well as whether sources have been chosen, voted up or down by users in the past, and eventually be able to suggest sources according to the subject at hand. My job would be to determine what those variables are i.e. what were editors looking at when deciding whether to use a source or not?

I started the research by talking to as many people as possible. Originally I was expecting that I would be able to conduct 10-20 interviews as the focus of the research, finding out how those editors went about managing sources individually and collaboratively. The initial interviews enabled me to hone my interview guide. One of my key informants urged me to ask questions about sources not cited as well as those cited, leading me to one of the key findings of the report (that the citation is often not the actual source of information and is often provided in order to appease editors who may complain about sources located outside the accepted Western media sphere). But I soon realized that the editors with whom I spoke came from such a wide variety of experience, work areas and subjects that I needed to restrict my focus to a particular article in order to get a comprehensive picture of how editors were working. I chose the 2011 Egyptian revolution article because I wanted a globally relevant breaking news event that would have editors from different parts of the world working together on an issue with local expertise located in a language other than English.

Read More…