Tag Archives: gabriella-coleman

Ethnozine: October edition


Gabriella Coleman’sethnozine_october research on the enigmatic Anonymous network has provided unique insights and dispeled myths about the group. In a guest contribution this month, Coleman writes about tensions in her work and what it means to be implicated in “the dance between Anonymous and journalism.”

Our other guest contributor, Cisco’s Mike Gotta, writes about rethinking enterprise social networking (ESN) design processes and the value of qualitative research for building ESN systems.

Heather Ford addresses the value of qualitative research in another context in her reflections on a WikiSym conference dominated by quantitative analyses of English language Wikipedia.

And Jenna Burrell discusses the challenges of keeping up with fieldwork from afar in her post on read-along ethnography, in which she examines the possibilities and limitations of understanding a distant fieldsite through a collaborator’s notes and images.

NOTES

NEXT MONTH

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. Email us at ethnographymatters[at]gmail!

Anonymous and I [guest contributor]


Editor’s Note: Anonymous may still be a mysterious network, but there is one researcher who has helped the world better understand their activities, Gabriella Coleman. In this month’s guest post, Gabriella discusses how her research on Anonymous changed the way she conducted fieldwork: she moved from being a traditional anthropologist to a more public anthropologist.

Her post brings up issues that are central to the founding of Ethnography Matters – how to be an ethnographer today. Increasingly, ethnographers are engaging with the media either as commentators, pundits, or experts. By opening up our work to the public, we make it more accessible and immediate, but how does public engagement change the work we do? Especially when the engagement becomes a mode of access for data.

Gabriella’s intro to her post on Limn highlights the tensions she has experienced as her fieldwork with Anonymous has evolved over time. Is her work more about Anonymous or journalism? Or perhaps it is about something else? Share your thoughts in the comments.

With such a controversial topic, many institutions may shy away from hosting Gabriella. But not McGill University, where she holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy in the Art History and Communication Studies Department. Trained as an anthropologist, her work examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. She’s writing a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. Follow her on twitter @biellacoleman.

Gabriella’s first book is coming out next month, Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking. You can pre-order it on Amazon!  In the meantime, Gabriella’ sresearch publications and non-academic writing will keep up busy until the book arrives. 

Check out past posts from guest bloggers. Ethnography Matters is always lining up guest contributors.  Send us an email!

–Tricia 

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When I first dove into the ethnographic study of Anonymous—the global protest movement known best for its digital protests tactics—I  never thought my project would also become one on journalists and hence the media.  But after about the 40th interview, it became pretty evident that this was a central part of my larger project and my ethnographic experience.

To have to be public about your work, while you are doing that work is no easy task; in fact it went against everything I was used to as anthropologist, which was to delve and burrow as deep as I could into a topic/world, and come out the tunnel on the other side, about a year later, ready to start conveying some insight and arguments.Read More… Anonymous and I [guest contributor]

Qualitative research is not research at all?


Image of building with torn sign reading "Rant"

Rant this way ~ Photo by Nesster, CC BY-SA

Heather pointed out these comments by Bob Garfield from a recent broadcast of On the Media (“Sentiment Analysis Reveals How the World is Feeling“):

I’ve been arguing for years that qualitative research, focus groups and the like, are not research at all. They don’t generate data. It’s statistically insignificant, easily manipulated, and from my perspective just as likely to be exactly wrong as exactly right.

Garfield then adds:

But it seems to me that what you’re dealing with is something that deals with all of my objections, because you’ve got the world’s largest focus group.

Sigh. This is wrong on so many levels, and anyone who is interested in ethnography already knows why, but just to touch on some of the problems:

  • Qualitative research can generate data. The tweets used in Johann Bollen‘s [1] sentiment analysis (the subject of this OTM episode), interview transcripts, field notes, photos, audiorecordings, visual recordings: all data. Some research within the qualitative tradition also generates numeric data [2] by, for example, calculating measures of intercoder reliability, or in the analysis of card sorting tasks.
  • There is a lot more to statistical testing than statistical significance (and some controversy among statisticians about overuse of significance testing). There is also more to quantitative analysis than statistical testing. Bayesian inference, for example, could be thought of as quantitative analysis that is not necessarily statistical testing.
  • Similarly, qualitative research cannot be reduced to “focus groups and the like”. The purposes, strengths and weaknesses of focus groups are very different from those of other qualitative methods such as [participant-]observation and one-on-one interviews [3].
  • Using statistical testing as a marker for what is or is not research omits work that has formed the backbone of the sciences such as classical experimentation, disconfirmation by example, comparative methods for creating typologies and analyzing artifacts, etc.
  • “Easily manipulated”? Yup, research findings in general can be manipulated. Statistical testing is really easy to manipulate.

Garfield’s statement also suggests either ignorance or dismissal of mixed methods research, which, I would argue, is increasingly becoming a gold standard for research in some fields, such as public health.

There’s a hint at why mixed methods have become so important in public health research in Garfield’s comment about “the world’s largest focus group.” Bollen’s use of a large collection of corpora is well-suited to his purposes, but other purposes can require different or additional kinds of work.

Let’s say I do a giant public health survey. If a minority in my sample doesn’t interpret a word or phrase in the same way that the majority interprets it, if some questions make no sense at all from their perspective, if people writing the survey have no idea what minority members’ concerns or experiences even are much less how they’re relevant to health, then the survey results will be meaningless for that social group.

There is no such thing as a survey that is not culturally informed. Without ethnographic work and awareness, surveys, public health information and campaigns, etc., will likely be culturally informed by those who are most powerful and/or in the majority. Qualitative research is indispensable for addressing structural health inequities affecting the less powerful. Should ethnographic work focused on these inequities be patted on the head and assured that it’s nice, but it’s not-really-research? Fortunately, the NIH does not think so.

Sometimes I wonder if people miss how widespread and useful qualitative work is because it can be invisible (see Tricia‘s related post about the ‘Invisibility of Ethnography‘). A couple recent episodes of On the Media may clarify the kind of research that Garfield is dismissing here, while at the same time (perhaps unknowingly?) depending on it.

On Nov. 4th, Garfield spoke with social media researcher danah boyd about “Parents helping kids lie online.” The paper [4] behind this interview presents quantitative summaries of survey data — “real” research, perhaps, to Garfield.  But hmm, how and why was this survey designed?

Read More… Qualitative research is not research at all?