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Who needs an ethnographer?


I recently found myself lamenting the lack of ethnography in my professional life with a new acquaintance. Don’t get me wrong: my job stretches me in other ways. But many of the things I was trained for during my PhD aren’t called for in my day job. Not explicitly, anyway, though I would argue that once you’ve been taught certain kinds of observational skills it’s very hard to turn them off.

“You should set up your own independent project,” she said. “Do some ethnography on the side.”

My acquaintance is Kat Jungnickel, a sociologist currently researching cycling cultures. I met her in her office where swatches of fabric were pinned to 19th century patent applications for women’s cycling clothes, a series of hand-sewn garments based on these patents hung on mannequins by the door, and early photos of coteries of women cyclists were pinned to a bulletin board. This kind of creative, tangible research is definitely something that I would like more of in my life.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, actually. I do want to use my qualitative research skills more but I’ve been hesitating because there doesn’t seem to be an obvious way to employ them in a volunteering context. At present I mainly use my writing and thinking skills for theatre reviewing–I find this very rewarding, but it’s not getting me to stretch my research muscles any.

But when I try to picture what a “volunteer ethnographer” might look like, I draw a blank. Ethnography isn’t generally the kind of skill people offer to volunteering efforts. There are all kinds of skills that charities and volunteer organisations need…bookkeeping, driving, cooking, tutoring, mentoring, crafting, building, and so on and so forth. But ethnography?

It’s still usually the ethnographer who initiates the study, the ethnographer who’s decided that there is something worth examining here.

When you get right down to it, who needs an ethnographer? Generally speaking in ethnographic research the person conducting the study calls the shots: the research lead decides who and what they will study and why it’s important that the world has (for example) a detailed, rich description of the belly dance community in the online game Second Life. (My chapter “Digitizing Raqs Sharqi: Belly Dance in Second Life” in Belly Dance Around the World: New Communities, Performance and Identity will explain everything you need to know.) Increasingly, ethnographers work with the communities they are studying to find out what are the most important issues to them and how an ethnographic study might serve them, instead of focusing on what the rest of the world can gain from that research. But it’s still usually the ethnographer who initiates the study, the ethnographer who’s decided that there is something worth examining here. I don’t know of many examples where it is the community who has asked the ethnographer to study them. Please comment if you know of any.

Read More… Who needs an ethnographer?

#GoOpenAccess for the Ethnography Matters Community


cadenas

In light of the tragic death of Aaron Swartz and the scrutiny it has placed on JSTOR in particular, the economics of research publications, and the ethics of keeping research publications behind paywalls, I thought there were a few more things to say about open access.

I’ve contemplated the idea for some time now about publishing from here on out only in open access journals. I already freely e-mail my own publications to anyone who requests a copy. And I just feel better (more virtuous?) when I publish a paper in an open access journal. I’ve published in both open and closed access journals. It could be a coincidence, but I’ve noticed that when I publish in open access journals, those publications tend to get more citations. That’s not proof, but it is a good sign that open access does a better job of getting your work in front of readers (which is obvious because such journals are available to the whole of the Internet, not just those who can get past a paywall). The reason I’ve published in ‘closed’ journals has to do with the pressures of being tenure-track. Some of the more prestigious journals are not open access. I’m looking at YOU Science, Technology and Human Values and New Media and Society. Anthropology journals in particular are notoriously out of step with the push towards open access (see the many posts over on Savage Minds, for example).

Read More… #GoOpenAccess for the Ethnography Matters Community

Why Ethnography Matters for me: Reflections on our 1 year anniversary


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… Why Ethnography Matters for me: Reflections on our 1 year anniversary

User experiences: fear, delight, and drug use research


"User" definition from dictionary.com

Screen capture from dictionary.com

 

I work at a research center that studies the use of various legal and illegal drugs, generally with a focus on preventing “misuse.” It can be an awkward topic of conversation socially. The whole notion conjures up images of Mr. Mackey from South Park and terrible anti-drug propaganda.

And honestly, not without reason. Research funders have agendas, and a funder’s concept of misuse is not always the same as what a community sees as misuse — which can make ethnographic research complicated.

So many messages about alcohol and drugs seem fueled by moral panic,  but I don’t think it’s an ethnographer’s business to judge people’s consumption. Panics over drugs remind me of panics over technology and the things it “makes” us do.  This trailer for the 1936 anti-drug movie Reefer Madness reads like technological determinism (material determinism?). People don’t just use marijuana in Reefer Madness, but they are used by it:

What can make sex crazed zombies of us all?
What can force us to kill?
What is the most despicable danger facing our children today?
The reefer! The reefer! The reefer!

Also, Google is making us stupid, and Facebook is making us lonely.Read More… User experiences: fear, delight, and drug use research

The Joy of Uprooting (One’s Own) Assumptions


Editor’s Note: There’s much to find on the Internet that is either ethnographically-inspired or that may inspire ethnographers.  Here our guest contributor Luisa Beck offers some comments on a blog post and a TED talk. She presents them in the style of the original weblogs that curated good finds from around the Internet. – Jenna

This week, a bit of browsing indulgence led me to discover a blog post and TED talk with a common theme – the delight of having one’s own assumptions undone.  It’s an experience ethnographers often seek out. But it’s refreshing to hear it described by others as something positive, even joyful.

In a recent blogpost, Ethan Zuckerman, director of the MIT Civic Media Lab and co-founder of Global Voices, an international blogging platform, describes a trip to Kenya in which he and his students wanted to test out an idea for a piece of hardware designed to help people in nations where electric power is scarce sell power to their neighbors. Once in Kenya, Ethan and his grad students travel to Baba Dogo, an intended industrial area on the outskirts of Nairobi where thousands of people live (the people Ethan talks to call it an “upscale slum”, using terms that have become common in a place where slum tourism is a lucrative business). They discover that their assumptions about power scarcity, people’s reluctance to pay for power, and the effort it would take to convince people to start micro-scale power businesses, were wrong. People living in Baba Dogo had ways of dealing with power scarcity that made sense only in the cultural, social and economic context particular to the place.  “We had to understand that not all commerce in the neighborhood was about the exchange of money for goods or services – often businesses provide favors to one another in complex webs of obligation,” Ethan writes.

Read More… The Joy of Uprooting (One’s Own) Assumptions

Trusting machines



Fool hu-mans, there is no escape!

The Wall Street Journal did a piece last week on drones that decide whether to fire on a target, provocatively titled “Could We Trust an Army of Killer Robots?”

Although the title goes for the sci-fi jugular, the article balances questions about robot decision making with concerns like those of Georgia Tech’s Mobile Robot Lab director Ronald Arkin:

His work has been motivated in large part by his concerns about the failures of human decision-makers in the heat of battle, especially in attacking targets that aren’t a threat. The robots “will not have the full moral reasoning capabilities of humans,” he explains, “but I believe they can—and this is a hypothesis—perform better than humans” [1]

In other words: Do we trust an army of people?

Drones might make better decisions in some contexts. Whether drones can be trusted is a whole ‘nother question.Read More… Trusting machines

The Demise of the Ethnographic Monograph?


As ethnographic practice has spilled out into the broader world of design and policy-making, business strategy and marketing, the monograph has not remained the singular format for presenting ethnographic work. In the spaces I’m most familiar with, the design community and high-tech industry, it is the conference paper (see EPIC, DIS, CSCW, and CHI, etc), the technology demo, and within corporate walls, the PowerPoint slideset or edited video that have become established formats for delivering ethnographic outputs. There is great pressure in some subfields to offer clearly outlined implications and propose practices alongside (or instead of) the theory and holistic description of the more conventional format.

In light of the publication this week of my own ethnographic monograph titled Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana, I thought it worth considering the question: why should someone outside of the Academy read my book or any other of this genre?
Read More… The Demise of the Ethnographic Monograph?

Core 77 Spotlights Service Design Ethnographer, Panthea Lee


panthea_face.jpg

Image courtesy of Panthea Lee

Ethnography Matters hopes to interview Panthea Lee of reBoot with our own list of questions, but in the meantime, Dave Seliger of Core 77 tracked Panthea down A Better World By Design conference. For those of you who are not familiar with Panthea’s work, Tricia Wang wrote about Panthea’s Design Research essay a few months ago on Ethnography Matters.

We liked Panthea’s explanation of NGO’s perception of their own value in a community:

With a lot of these NGO’s, people assume they’re doing a lot of good work and then they design a program poorly or design a bad service and they put it out there and beneficiaries have to use it because they don’t have any other options. There’s no accountability.

Panthea then cuts through the hype of designing for “social change”:

Design for social change is a very “sexy” topic and you see a lot of design firms now going to the public sector and to NGO’s saying, ‘We’re designers, we’re here to help you!’ And they’re like, ‘What are you talking about? You don’t speak our language, you don’t know development theory, you don’t know our approach.’ It helps to know why things are the way they are today because so much of the time you see people jumping in and saying, ‘We’re going to design for change and things are going to be better.’

But what’s the context around why we have these problems to begin with? What has already been tried? I think design firms—well-intended, very talented—don’t always understand that and so I think governments look at them a little weirdly. With most of the people from Reboot, we come from those kinds of organizations and we know what we don’t know. I think that is an advantage for us.

Read the rest of the interview with Panthea on Core 77, A Better World By Design Spotlight on Panthea Lee of Reboot.  And if you didn’t get to go the conference, Dave Seliver provides a roundup of each day of the conference a the end of the post!

Cheering up the chatbot


The speech to text tool on my phone is convinced that “ethnography” = “not greasy.” (At least “not greasy” tends to be a postive thing?) Generally STT and voice commands work great on it though. You have to talk to it the right way: Enunciate; dramatic pauses between each word; don’t feed it too many words at once. The popular speech recognition application Dragon NaturallySpeaking emphasizes that users train the system to recognize their voices, but there’s always an element of the system training its users how to talk.

For entertainment purposes, it’s best to avoid the careful pauses and smush things together, producing text message gems like “Send me the faxable baby.”  It’s the mismatches between human intention and machine representation that can make using natural language interaction tools like STT, chatbots and speech prediction both frustrating and hilarious. When it’s bad, it’s really really good.

I’ve been playing with the game Cheer up the Chatbot the last couple days (from RRRR, “Where the games play you”).

Chatbot has an unusual way of interacting with people, as so many chatbots do.

Screen explaining Chatbot's mental disorders

Screen explaining Chatbot’s mental disorders

Understandably, Chatbot is sad.

chatbotissad

Poor chatbot

 

The goal is to get Chatbot to smile.

Open-ended questions make robots happy

Open-ended questions make robots happy

 

The game is a mix of bot and human-to-human chat, where you switch between talking to the game’s bot and to different players who are presented as the “Chatbot” speaker to each other.  When you hit a moment where there are enough players with different agendas online — including some who don’t know how the game works, some presenting as Chatbot, and some presenting as people — it can get weird.

Read More… Cheering up the chatbot

The ethnography of robots


Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact with robots, which I and others have been doing),” wrote Geiger, “but the ways in which bots themselves relate to the world”. Geiger believes that constructing and relating an emic account of the non-human should be the ultimate challenge for ethnography but that he’s getting an absurd amount of pushback from it.” He explains why in this fascinating account of what it means to study the culture of robots.

Stuart Geiger speaking about bots on Wikipedia at the CPoV conference by Institute of Network Cultures on Flickr

HF: So, what’s new, almost-Professor Geiger?

SG: I just got back from the 4S conference — the annual meeting of the Society for the Social Study of Science — which is pretty much the longstanding home for not just science studies but also Science and
Technology Studies. I was in this really interesting session featuring some really cool qualitative studies of robots, including two ethnographies of robotics. One of the presenters, Zara Mirmalek, was looking at the interactions between humans and robots within a modified framework from intercultural communication and workplace studies.

I really enjoyed how she was examining robots as co-workers from different cultures, but it seems like most people in the room didn’t fully get it, thinking it was some kind of stretched metaphor. People kept giving her the same feedback that I’ve been given — isn’t there an easier way you can study the phenomena that interest you without attributing culture to robots themselves? But I saw where she was going and asked her about doing ethnographic studies of robot culture itself, instead of the culture of people who interact with robots — and it seemed like half the room gave a polite chuckle. Zara, however, told me that she loved the idea and we had a great chat afterwards about this.Read More… The ethnography of robots