Ethnography Matters

What are ethnography’s doings? I mean, really, how do you describe what exactly an ethnographer does? S/he watches people? Explains people’s feelings? Translates cultural ideas into concrete stuff? I’ve come up with some interesting ways that work for me to describe my work, but it still requires context and to a person who has never worked with an ethnographer before, it’s not always clear.

Heller Communication writes about the invisibility of socially innovative design.

Design for social innovation begins with the design of conversations themselves – it requires treating a conversation with the same care, and the same planning, that would be appropriate for the design of a product. Conversation starts everything – and yet we rarely think of them as an opportunity for design. This is not only the most important, upstream part of the systems that we need to change, it’s the fastest way for a designer to become a vital part of a strategic initiative. It’s where things begin, and where the most important things are decided.

On the hard side, it doesn’t provide much of a portfolio. Nothing to enter into design competitions, few samples to put on your website, harder to explain at a cocktail party just what it is that you do. In fact, most of the invisible things you’ll be designing are private and sensitive to CEOs and leaders of all types of organizations. You can’t even talk about them. This can be a tough shift for designers who are loathe to give up the artifacts of their work. Of course it doesn’t mean that you won’t design any artifacts, it only means that they will be the last thing you design, not the first.Read More… The Invisibility of Ethnography

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A couple weeks ago I woke up at five in the morning to what sounded like a battalion of helicopters overhead. It was not the first time. Whenever there’s been a protest in my downtown/uptown Oakland neighborhood following a new development in the Oscar Grant case, out come the helicopters and police.

I figured it was Occupy Oakland being raided since there had been rumors the police would come early in the morning, and I went outside to look around. The streets were barricaded for blocks, and there was no way to see what was going on inside.

When I returned later, the plaza was still barricaded and guarded by a line of police in riot gear. Occupy Oakland protesters were amassed outside the barricades, some sitting on the sidewalk with backpacks and sleeping bags. I wondered if they were planning to move back in, if they had somewhere else to go, and how they saw the space of the plaza they had inhabited. I went home and came back with some markers and paper, hoping that some protesters would be interested in drawing pictures of Oscar Grant Plaza (the name Occupy Oakland gave to Frank Ogawa Plaza when they moved in) or maybe of Oscar Grant — something to capture the place they had created.

The drawings people did of Oscar Grant Plaza, especially, got me thinking about place and space in the sense that Harrison & Dourish describe in this piece (pdf)[1]. In their terms, space is an opportunity or collection of affordances. Place, meanwhile is:

generally a space with something added—social meaning, convention, cultural understandings about role, function and nature and so on. The sense of place transforms the space. (p. 3)

The place Oscar Grant Plaza was before the raid — a space with something added — looked like this to one of the Occupy Oakland protesters, Luka:

Before Police @ Oscar Grant Plaza ~ Drawing by Luka

Read More… Welcome to Oscar Grant Plaza

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“In terms of internet research, multi-sited ethnography – in particular Marcus’s tracking strategy of “following the thing,” can provide a methodological approach that accounts for the role of material objects (technologies, artifacts, media) in describing social processes that are constituted in and articulated through sociotechnical practices. Conventionally, ethnographic research has concentrated primarily on the role of human actors in meaning-making processes. While documents and artifacts have certainly been part of ethnographic projects, those objects have often been examined as the product, and not a co-producer of, culture. The result is that technology often plays a limited role in understanding social practices, a point Bruno Latour makes arguing that technical objects are the “missing masses” in social science (1992).”

Walker, Dana M. (2010) The Location of Digital Ethnography, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

reblogged from modernandmaterialthings

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3e5mivkXmsc
badethnography has a shared a teaching gem: Walter Wippersberg‘s 1994 Film, Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich  – Dark, Mysterious Austria.  I am now assigning , to all my students. If you teach qualitative methods, consider including this in your syllabus.

Produced for Austria’s SBS-TV, this films pokes fun at old-school ethnography from anthropologists and the National Geographic-esque like exposes on the exotic Africans and South American natives.

“A team of the All African Television network wanders into the darkest regions of the Eastern Alps. They observe the habits and rituals of the natives and make not one, but two ethnological major break-through discoveries.” IMDB

badethnography tell us that at

“At 5:40, we learn that the team has disproved the theory that Europeans are monogamous; starting at about 7:50, they describe the elaborate costumes and militaristic symbolism of clans of the Tyrol region of Austria; and at 15:00, there’s a great discussion of the curious obsession with “patently useless activities,” such as biking for no other purpose than biking itself.

Aside from the humorous commentary, it’s a great way of illustrating the sociological imagination,  which requires us to step out of our own culture and try to look at it through the eyes of an outsider — and, as C. Wright Mills put it, to recapture the ability to be astonished by what we normally take for granted.”

Often times ethnography can feel so heavy and serious –  power and culture ad naseum.

But what does power and culture look like? How do you explain exoticism, imperialism, and ethnocentrism? Dunkles, Rätselhaftes Österreich is a wonderful video to start those conversations because it’s silly! Part of why I love ethnography so much is that it is so fun and I think this video is a great reminder for ethnographers to laugh a bit at ourselves. In all of our musings over the practice and theory of ethnography, we’ve got to remember that we live in a wonderfully silly world and how lovely it is that we live in a period where we get to play all day in collecting knowledge of “man,” a la Foucault.

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and btw – I don’t think I could ever visit the Alps of Austria without constantly thinking of this video.

UPDATE: Also check out Kitchen Stories, a Swedish film about an ethnographic study on kitchens. It’s a comedy. You can buy the DVD on amazon and watch 2 clips here. Thanks Leila Takayama for the tip!

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An Xiao Mina’s latest post about seat numbers in China is a great example of how design that attempts to understand the user’s world matters. She explains in her post why there is no 12E in this photo:

Contrary to intuition for English speakers, seats 12F and 12D are next to each other on the train. Why no 12E? After some time, I realized it’s because the letter E sounds like the number 1 in Chinese.

Without awareness of how the letter E sounds in this context, any designer (Chinese speaking or non-Chinese speaking) could easily overlook this very minor detail that would great confusion for a person who is looking for their seat.

Minimizing unintentional confusion in design requires attention to the details. This is why ethnography and user studies are important.

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xkcd’s Updated Map of Online Communities

I arrived in Nairobi last night after an absence of about five years. As I left the plane through the walkway, I took a deep breath and inhaled the familiar southern African smell that I always miss so much living in America. I walked through to customs and baggage claim and to my taxi and hotel and became aware of all the things I was noticing: my slight frustration at the absence of instructions about which line to stand in at the immigration hall; the fact that there was not enough room for my place of birth in the immigration paperwork; the fact that, in stark contrast to the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport that I had come from, this airport seems not to have changed in a decade or so.

I noticed how long we had to wait for our bags to come through, the nationalities of the people coming here, how closely they stood next to one another. And my driver, patiently waiting for me, familiar sign in hand. On the car ride to the hotel, I looked at billboards and noticed what was being advertised and who was being represented, the state of repair of the roads and the roadside flowers and how people drive and the smells of food and industry and bodies.

Read More… New geographies

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It’s Bieber’s world; we’re just living in it.

In an illustration of the socio-technical gap, people[1] mostly consider Occupy Wall Street a trending topic, but Twitter’s algorithms mostly do not.

Amid rumors that Twitter is suppressing #occupy tags from trending, Gilad Lotan looked at data on tweets containing occupy-related terms and on occupy-related trending topics since September 25th.  In Lotan’s analysis, trending topics require a spike in the rate of activity, rather than a slow and steady increase in volume. #OccupyWallStreet, in Lotan’s example, was never a trending topic in New York where the action started. Instead, it first broke through as  a trending topic in Madrid.

Read More… Why everyone loves Bieber

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Rachelle Annechino and I are recent graduates of the School of Information at UC Berkeley. We met one cold, sunny summer day in August (only in San Francisco!) when I arrived to find friends to learn Python with. Rachelle and I meet to co-work and chat at Brown Couch Café in Oakland where we talk about fascinating bits and pieces from our lives and work. For her final project, Rachelle and her project partner, Yo-Shang Cheng interviewed San Francisco residents and asked them to draw pictures of their internal images or “mental maps” of the neighborhoods they lived in and of the city as a whole. They then visualized these mental maps according to concepts like ‘corridors’ (where are the hearts of each neighbourhood?), ‘barriers’ (is it really that close? It’s not always as simple as it looks getting from one neighbourhood to another in San Francisco) and ‘boundaries’ (what neighbourhood are you in? according to whom?). Rachelle is simply one of the most insightful, brilliant people I know. And she rocks at Python – which makes her a good friend to have.

I met Jenna Burrell when Rachelle and I took her Qualitative Research Methods class last year. Jenna has been doing research on Internet use in Ghana for the past decade or so and was one of the most inspiring teachers that I had at the I School. Jenna’s forthcoming book ‘Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana’ is an incredibly rich contribution to our understanding of African Internet culture. Mostly when I think of Jenna, I think of the fact that while I was in Accra speaking in staid conference rooms during the Africa preparatory conference for the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005, Jenna was also out talking to young Ghanaians in Internet cafes and in the streets who were disconnected from a discussion which was ostensibly about them. Jenna is an incredible mentor and her writing about ‘The Fieldsite as a Network’ has been so helpful in thinking about how to ‘do’ digital ethnography. She continues to push the boundaries of the discipline and ask important questions about how digital technologies might become part of the grassroots, self-organizing efforts of populations marginalized from the global economy.

Tricia Wang was introduced to me in one of Jenna’s classes when Jofish Kaye suggested I read about the work she had done on Internet censorship in China. I looked her up and just knew we would be friends. Tricia’s critique of the Google China debacle and her calling for Google to employ more ethnographers in order to better understand the Chinese internet culture was so powerful, and her PhD work on migrant workers is inspiring to say the least. As I write this, Tricia is in China doing her fieldwork, sleeping in Internet cafes and accompanying migrant workers as they move through the city. She’s trying to understand how the use of technology changes how people interact with the physical city, a concept she calls’ digital urbanism on the margins’: migrants’ urban lives mediated through communications technologies like mobile phones and computers in Internet cafes.

And then there’s me, the budding ethnographer, finding herself lucky to know these incredible people and looking forward to the little journey we’re going to go on at this site. Ethnography Matters will be a place where we can share what we’re reading and writing about, how we’re thinking about ethnography, and hopefully giving a little insight for others who are thinking about a career in ethnography into what this even means today. We’ll have others join us in the future, and if you’re interested in contributing, please let us know. We’re looking forward to walking around in your shoes too!

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