Ethnography Matters

Tricia Wang

Editor’s Note: Tricia provides an excellent segue between last month’s “Ethnomining” Special Edition and this month’s on “Talking to Companies about Ethnography.” She offers further thoughts building on our collective discussion (perhaps bordering on obsession?) with the big data trend. With nuance she tackles and reinvents some of the terminology circulating in the various industries that wish to make use of social research. In the wake of big data ethnographer’s, she suggests, can offer thick data. In the face of derisive mention of “anecdotes” we ought to stand up to defend the value of stories.

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image from Mark Smiciklas at Intersection Consulting

Big Data can have enormous appeal. Who wants to be thought of as a small thinker when there is an opportunity to go BIG?

The positivistic bias in favor of Big Data (a term often used to describe the quantitative data that is produced through analysis of enormous datasets) as an objective way to understand our world presents challenges for ethnographers. What are ethnographers to do when our research is seen as insignificant or invaluable? Can we simply ignore Big Data as too muddled in hype to be useful?

No. Ethnographers must engage with Big Data. Otherwise our work can be all too easily shoved into another department, minimized as a small line item on a budget, and relegated to the small data corner. But how can our kind of research be seen as an equally important to algorithmically processed data? What is the ethnographer’s 10 second elevator pitch to a room of data scientists?

…and GO!

Big Data produces so much information that it needs something more to bridge and/or reveal knowledge gaps. That’s why ethnographic work holds such enormous value in the era of Big Data.

Lacking the conceptual words to quickly position the value of ethnographic work in the context of Big Data, I have begun, over the last year, to employ the term Thick Data (with a nod to Clifford Geertz!) to advocate for integrative approaches to research. Thick Data uncovers the meaning behind Big Data visualization and analysis.

Thick Data: ethnographic approaches that uncover the meaning behind Big Data visualization and analysis.

Thick Data analysis primarily relies on human brain power to process a small “N” while big data analysis requires computational power (of course with humans writing the algorithms) to process a large “N”. Big Data reveals insights with a particular range of data points, while Thick Data reveals the social context of and connections between data points. Big Data delivers numbers; thick data delivers stories. Big data relies on machine learning; thick data relies on human learning.

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Image from davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com

Welcome to the Stories to Action edition of Ethnography Matters (last month was the Openness edition, curated by Heather Ford)!

Over the last few decades, organizations have learned to use the tools and approaches of ethnography to inform product and service development.[1] But the idea of gaining context-specific insights about users before a product or service is engineered is still relatively new. In May, Jenna Burrell is curating an edition on how to talk to organizations about ethnographic research (please reach out if you’d like to guest post for that edition!).

This month, we want to show that the ethnographic process is more than just an insight-generating machine. As ethnographers, we gather stories, analyze them, and identify the relevant insights. But, we do so much more. We do stuff with those stories and insights. We design products, services, apps, campaigns, and programs. We create new approaches to problem-solving. All that analyzing? It never stops. Like software programmers, we are constantly improving our designs.

To ethnographers this is all obvious. But it’s not always clear to others.

Clients often focus on end-product insights, failing to realize that ethnographic practice is a complex and multi-stage process. It is common among ethnographers working in the private or public sector to share frustrations that clients want ethnographic insights, but do not grasp the fieldwork and analytical work required to produce deep insights.

As ethnographers, we can feel the fieldsite in our bones. It stays with us. We can recall every participant’s face, the colors of their clothes, the texture of their hair, and the way they hold their cellphones. Long hours of fieldwork are sprinkled into memos, invoices, project management files, and proprietary qualitative software.

We can close our eyes and envision the tangible evidence of shadowing and participant observation: the project room filled with colored sticky notes on the walls, black and red sharpies strewn over the table, and white boards full of diagrams.

We are haunted by the people we interview—the woman whose hands trembled as she told a deep secret that she had never told anyone else or that kid who showed so much joy when he started leveling up.

The meaning of these experiences, these stories, and every minute detail of the research is clear to us. We know the weight of our analysis.

All the client sees: one powerpoint.

With the client’s myopic focus on insights, ethnographers may mistakenly think that clients don’t need to see the messy stuff. Fieldnotes, stories, and analysis seem less important.

Both clients’ focus on insights and ethnographers’ acceptance of this had led to an undesirable outcome for the field of business ethnography: many of the core practices of ethnographic observations and analysis become invisible and devalued.

Our hope is to offer more examples of how ethnographic research can contribute to amazing design decisions. Great stories from the field inform our actions in the development phase of our projects. For this month’s story edition, we wanted to showcase the strength of amazing stories that can go a long way to inform insights and actions.

This month’s Stories to Actions theme was inspired by a panel that I curated at Microsoft’s annual Social Computing Symposium organized by Lily Cheng at NYU’s ITP.

I had asked several researchers to share a specific story from their field experience, the insights gained from the story, and how those insights shaped their projects. This edition will feature posts that will further explore important stories from ethnographic research that have led to important insights from prominent ethnographic researchers:

• While working for Ushahidi, Heather Ford did fieldwork on Wikipedia. She shares a particular story that stood out for her, the insights gained from the story and how it informed Ushahidi’s understanding of the intersections between global and local narratives.
• Panthea Lee will talk about Reboot’s fieldwork on human trafficking and how it informed the outreach campaign they designed.
• Morgan Ames will talk about her research with OLPC and how stories helped her understand how participants deal with first impressions.
• An Xiao Mina will share her story about discovering the local context of internet humor in Uganda and how it will inform her new project, the Civic Beat.

In addition to the stories shared at the Social Computing Symposium, we also have a guest post from Adriana Young Valdez about how she used stories gathered from ethnographic work to design games.

The posts in the Stories to Action Edition will shed some light on the important stories behind ethnographic research that may sometimes be overlooked when clients are only looking for big picture insights.

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We’re looking for guest contributors for Nicolas Nova’s Ethnomining edition in April. Check out the upcoming themes to see if you have something to submit!

Check out past posts from guest contributors! Join our email groups for ongoing conversations. Follow us on twitter and facebook.

Ethnography Matters is one year old this month! Pick CC BY NC SA by jacsonquerubin on Flickr

Ethnography Matters is one year old! Anniversaries are always surrounded with a quality of epicness and grandness. But I don’t feel so much epic or grand today as I feel grateful.

When Heather Ford asked me to join her, Rachelle Annechino, and Jenna Burrell to start a group blog about ethnography, I immediately said yes. Honestly, it’s not too hard to get me blogging – I already have like 20 blogs. I would’ve agreed if Heather asked me to blog about doggies. Though it did help that Heather, Jenna, and Rachelle are really wonderful people

But I said yes to Ethnography Matters because I recognized that the space we were carving out was important because nobody was talking about and celebrating ethnographers who weren’t bound by the traditional boundaries of anthropology and sociology.  Most conversations about ethnography were taking place either inside industry doors, academic conferences or departmentx, or blogs that fell along industry or field boundaries.

We felt that ethnography should be understood by a wider audience of non-specialists.  At the same time, we recognized that ethnographers needed a space to talk about the new challenges and opportunities that digital tools posed as objects of study, as analytical tools, and as a medium for conducting fieldwork.

When I joined Ethnography Matters, I didn’t realize how important it would become for my own work.  I was in the middle of an 18-month fieldwork trip that was the last phase of my 7 years of fieldwork in China. I was feeling a bit isolated from other forms of ethnography as this was my longest stint of academic research.

Since my first post in October 2011, I’ve come to rely on Ethnography Matters as a place for me to be exposed to other ethnographers’ experiences.  I have learned so much from Heather, Rachelle, and Jenna over the last year.

Heather’s Wikipedia posts are always illuminating and her post on Coye Chesire’s seminar on trust is super helpful for my own research on online trust. Her interview with Stuart Geiger on the ethnography of robots really pushed me to think about ethnography in a whole different context, and even now I can’t totally wrap my mind around it – like really – ethnography on robots?  Read More…

I “formally” discovered ethnography during my undergraduate degree in Cognitive Sciences when studying in France. Aside from classes in experimental psychology, we had courses in linguistics and cultural anthropology which is where I ran across this field and its approach. I remember that the lectures were fascinating, and the assignments were even more intriguing. We had to run interviews and observe curious topics such as how car-makers named auto-parts and their color, or how people make sense of the spatial environment. What caught me as interesting at the time was the approach, as it was totally different than the controlled experiments we had to run in Cognitive Psychology. Now that I think about it, the gap between these research endeavors is also huge in an epistemological sense, and I’m not sure that people in our program got that from the outset, but it was a marvelous opportunity to understand ethnography.

What I enjoyed was that it framed the way I was curious about the world, artifacts, people, and what they were doing. It basically corresponded to a more rigorous approach compared to something I use to do as a kid with my brother: going anywhere, sitting on a bench and looking at people, trying to make sense of what they were doing… an activity we used to called very naively “street physiognomy” (which, in retrospect, wasn’t physiognomy at all since we were focused on people’s activities).
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As far as fieldwork tools go, hardly anything drives an ethnographer more crazy than trying to find the most appropriate fieldwork tools.  That is why we decided for the August issue of Ethnography Matters, we’d talk all about fieldwork tools and launch a new series called “The Tools we Use.”

Heather Ford starts us off with a discussion of the software she uses for her Wikipedia research, followed by Jenna Burrell’srecommendations for software she has tried and wants to try in the field. Rachelle Annechino suggests a few Android appsalong with colored markers and Tricia Wang tells us about her anxieties of not knowing which tools she’ll use for her analysis process.

“Tools we Use” is an ongoing series, so if you have a fieldwork process or an app review you’d like to contribute, please contact us!

Rachelle Annechino also offers another post this month on the fears and delights in using ethnography to research drug use. She reveals some assumptions around drug consumption. And she throws in Lady Gaga to her post!

For the August issue of Ethnography Matters, Jenna, Heather, and Rachelle have written great posts about their fieldnote tools in the Tools we Use series. Now I have all these new apps I want to try for data analysis!

So this is when I admit here that I have no perfect process. I really don’t. Sometimes this upsets me and sometimes I just say whatever.  I’ve only figured out parts of the process. For example, last month, I wrote in depth about my use of Instagram to live fieldnote. But that’s just one part of the long path of fieldwork analysis. Now that I’ve finished data gathering,  I am no longer in the excitement of fieldwork. I don’t have a team of people to work with as I usually do on projects. For my China research,  it’s just me. And all I can think is, how am I going to analyze all this data without going crazy?

I’ve tried all the coding software possible for qualitative research, but there is no app that fulfills my needs. I have developed an aversion to anything that claims to be a “qualitative analysis tool.” These tools are lacking in user friendliness, collaborative features, platform diversity, and service support. If it doesn’t run on a mac and if the software’s website is unusable – that’s already a clue.

As far as fieldwork tools go, hardly anything drives an ethnographer more crazy than trying to find the most appropriate fieldwork tools. Of all the ethnography courses I’ve taken and all the books, dissertation, and papers I’ve read, none of them go into depth on the tools that ethnographers use to support their process. I suspect that one of the reasons why ethnographers don’t write about the tools they use is because they may use an ad hoc process that is messier and less structured than they’d like to admit. Read More…

Ethnozine: July ’12 edition

Just because summer is here doesn’t mean that ethnographers slow down.This month Heather Ford updates us on her Wikipedia research. She shares with us screenshots from her digital ethnography of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, revealing how Wikipedians manage sources in breaking news events. Tricia Wang finished up a few years of fieldwork in China and shares with us a new process for writing ethnographic fieldnotes, live fieldnoting. We have four guest contributors for The Ethnographer’s Reading List. Sam Ladner’s list mixes creativity with time, religion, and humor. Nicolas Nova’s list takes us back to objects, public spaces, and lines. Christina Dennaoui’s list brings us some science, emotion and pain. Elisa Oreglia’s list gives us something new, something blue, and something borrowed.

 Other tidbits:

Jason Antrosio at Living Anthropologically compiled a list of anthropology communities with a facebook page. We saw familiar communities like Savage Minds, but we also discovered new ones like Neuroanthropology,  ALLA (The Association of Latina/o Anthropologistsa) and How to be an Anthropologist.  We’ve added several their blogs and a few new ones to our blogroll. Do let us know if you would like to suggest a site to add to our blogroll!

Do you have a post that you would like featured on Ethnography Matters? Or would you like to be our next guest contributor? Here are some ideas for how you can participate. Email us! We’d love to hear from you.

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I just returned from fieldwork in China. I’m excited to share a new way I’ve been writing ethnographic fieldnotes, called live fieldnoting. I spoke about live fieldnoting in a recent interview with Fast Company that also featured a slideshow of my live fieldnotes. I want to elaborate on the process in this post.

At one point in time, all ethnographers wrote their notes down with a physical pen and paper. But with mobiles, laptops, iPads, and digital pens, not all ethnographers write their fieldnotes. Some type their fieldnotes. Or some do both. With all these options, I have struggled to come up with the perfect fieldnote system.

I have experimented with the Livescribe Pen, regular old notebook, and a laptop. The Livescribe digital pen didn’t work for me because it’s really uncomfortable to use after a half hour of writing and its dependency on digital paper makes it inflexible for fieldwork outside of the US and longterm extended fieldwork (my review of the pen on CulturalByt.es). The notebook seems like the most practical solution. But I can’t seem to find the “perfect” notebook. Do I use a really small one that fits in my pocket? A medium size one that allows me to write more? If it’s too big then it looks like a “notebook.” And what should this notebook look like? Does a black moleskin look too nice for my fieldsite? Does it look too official? Does my notebook allow me to fit in with teens? But the notebook with bears and hearts that I use around teens doesn’t work for my meetings with government officials. And in the end no matter what kind of notebook I use, I still have to type all my notes to Evernote. So using a laptop is inevitable as all notes eventually end up there and are cleaned up there. Read More…

The June Ethnozine is online.

Summer is here in the Western hemisphere! Many of us are going into fieldwork or doing some catch up reading. This month we are launching a new series called “The Ethnographer’s Reading List.” We’re starting off with Tricia Wang’s summer reading list and then featuring two contributors who work in the industry, Carla Borsoi of AOL and Jay Owens of FACE. Thanks to Roy Christopher for giving us the inspiration to create the Reading List series! Every summer, Roy asks friends and colleagues to create a reading list in which he laboriously compiles and links to Powell’s online store. After we saw his list, we wanted to create an ongoing one at Ethnography Matters. Do check out Roy’s 2012 list that has contributions from Howard Reingold to Douglas Rushkoff.

Our July guest contributor, Jared Braiterman, is a design anthropologist based in Tokyo, Japan. Jared starts off the summer with an exciting post, first telling us that we should break anthropology rules and second suggesting that design anthropology is distinct from ethnography.  The last time we had a post this provocative was when guest contributor Sam Ladner asked if “Corporate Ethnography sucked?” What are your thoughts on Jared’s ideas? What rules do you break? And how different do you think design anthropology is from ethnography? We’d love to hear your thoughts on Jared’s article in the comments section.

Jenna gives us the final installments of the The Ethnographer’s Complete Guide to Big Data. You can read all three installments together, part 1 , part 2, and part 3. Lastly, Heather talks to Annie Lin of Wikimedia Foundation about their collaboration between Cairo and the Middle East.

We announced the idea for an ethnographic reading group last month on Mendeley. We’ve just posted some of our ideas for how to conduct the group. For now, the blog contributors will experiment with how to conduct a virtual reading group and we’ll report back by the end of the summer on how to start a reading group! Anyone who is interested is invited to join on Mendeley (sign up here). Also help compile a list of ethnographic monographs on our shared Mendeley group or share with us your ideas for the group!

Do you have a post that you would like featured on Ethnography Matters? Or would you like to be our next guest contributor? Here are some ideas for how you can participate. Email us! We’d love to hear from you.