Ethnography Matters

In this final post for The Person in the (Big) Data edition of Ethnography Matters, we provide a collection of five mixed methods used by researchers to shine a light on the people behind the massive streams of data that are being produced as a result of online behavior. These research methods use a variety of digital and traditional methods but they share one thing in common: they are aimed at discovering stories. As Tricia Wang wrote on EM back in 2013, ‘Big Data needs Thick Data’. While ‘Big Data delivers numbers; thick data delivers stories. Big data relies on machine learning; thick data relies on human learning.’ In the methods outlined below, researchers outline how they have made the most of digital data using innovative methods that uncover the meaning, the context, the stories behind the data. In the end, this is still the critical piece for researchers trying to understand the moment in which we are living. Or, put differently, the ways in which we may want to live but are often prevented from by a system that sometimes reduces the human experience rather than to enable its flourishing. – HF, Ed.

1. Real-time Audience Feedback: The Democratic Reflection Method

Democratic Reflection is a new methodological tool for researching the real-time responses of citizens to televised media content, which was developed by a team of researchers from the University of Leeds and the Open University in the UK as part of a larger research project on TV election debates. The research for the project began by developing an inductive understanding of what people need from TV election debates in order to perform their role as democratic citizens. Drawing on focus groups with a diverse range of participants, the research identified five key demands — or ‘democratic entitlements’ — that participants felt debates and the political actors involved in them should meet. Participants felt entitled to be: (1) addressed as rational and independent decision makers, (2) given the information needed to make considered political judgements, (3) included in and engaged by the debates, (4) recognised and represented by the political leaders, and (5) provided with meaningful choices that allow them to make a difference politically. In the next phase of the research, the research team developed a new web-based app (accessible via mobile phones, tablets, and laptops), which allows viewers to respond to televised debates in real time and evaluate them using a range of twenty statements based on the five democratic entitlements. An experiment using the Democratic Reflection app was conducted with a panel of 242 participants during the first debate of the 2015 UK General Election, generating a dataset of over 50,000 responses. Analysis of the data provides a valuable new way to understand how viewers respond to election debates: we can explore general patterns of responses, compare different individuals and groups, track changes over time, and examine how specific moments and performances during the debates may relate to particular responses. – Giles MossRead More… Five Mixed Methods for Research in the (Big) Data Age

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

This edition of EM is jam-packed with methods for doing people-centred digital research and is edited by EM co-founder Heather Ford (@hfordsa)
newly-appointed Fellow in Digital Methods at the University of Leeds and thus super excited to understand her role as an ethnographer who (also) does digital methods.

Today we launch the next edition of Ethnography Matters entitled: ‘Methods for uncovering the Person in the (Big) Data’. The aim of the edition is to document some of the innovative methods that are being used to explore online communities, cultures and politics in ways that connect people to the data created about/by them. By ‘method’, we mean both the things that researchers do (interviews, memo-ing, member checking, participant observation) as well as the principles that underpin what many of us do (serving communities, enabling people-centred research, advocating for change). In this introductory post, I outline the current debate around the risks of data-centric research methods and introduce two principles of people-centric research methods that are common to the methods that we’ll be showcasing in the coming weeks.

As researchers involved in studying life in an environment suffused by data, we are all (to at least some extent) asking and answering questions about how we employ digital methods in our research practice. The increasing reliance on natively digital methods is part of what David Berry calls the “computational turn” in the social sciences, and what industry researchers recognize as moves towards Big Data and the rise of Data Science.

‘Digital Methods‘ by Richard Rogers (2013)

First, a word on digital methods. In his groundbreaking work on digital methods, Richard Rogers argued for a move towards natively digital methods. In doing so, Rogers distinguishes between methods that have been digitized (e.g. online surveys) vs. those that are “born digital” (e.g. recommender systems), arguing that the Internet should not only be seen as an object for studying online communities but as a source for studying modern life that is now suffused by data. “Digital methods,” writes Rogers, “strives to follow the evolving methods of the medium” by the researcher becoming a “native” speaker of online vocabulary and practices.

The risks of going natively digital

There are, however, risks associated with going native. As ethnographers, we recognize the important critical role that we play of bridging different communities and maintaining reflexivity about our research practice at all times and this makes ethnographers great partners in data studies. Going native in this context, in other words, is an appropriate metaphor for both the benefits and risks of digital methods because the risk is not in using digital methods but in focusing too much on data traces.

Having surveyed some of debates about data-centric methodology, I’ve categorized the risks according to three core themes: 1. accuracy and completeness, 2. access and control, 3. ethical issues.Read More… The Person in the (Big) Data

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

[Image via GIPHY]

We are currently soliciting contributions to the March/April edition of EthnographyMatters. The aim of the edition is to document some of the innovative methods that are being used to explore online communities, cultures and politics in ways that connect people to the data created about/by them. By ‘method’, we mean both the things that ethnographers do (interviews, memo-ing, member checking, participant observation) as well as the principles that underpin what many of us do (serving communities, enabling people-centred research, advocating for change). Ethnography has never been tied indelibly with qualitative methods: the practice of ethnography requires using a suite of methods in order to reach our goals and there are multiple methods that ethnographers share with Big Data researchers.

The availability of data that is generated as a by-product of online activities offers researchers with useful ways of understanding online communities. Such methods can go far beyond merely the collection and visualisation/analysis of that data outside of the human context that constitutes the majority of Big Data research. ‘Small Methods for Big Data’ is not about methods “in the service of” Big Data but rather in the “context of”. Not “either… or” but rather “both… and”. Not one before the other, but both together in a circular motion towards understanding.

Examples of fresh ways of connecting data and people include:

• Defining the fieldsite by employing the metaphor of a network [Burrell, 2009];
• Using social media such as Instagram to write public field notes and memos [Wang, 2012];
• Conducting interviews with users by bringing in visualised traces of the user’s online experiences [Dubois and Ford, 2015].

There are, however, many others and we want to collect them as well as to publish reflections on their principled use in ethnographic and mixed method research in a small sample/vignette of innovative approaches. The vignette could then be used in teaching and research, inspiring others to add to the collection of methods and strategies used to connect people and data in innovative ways.

You can participate by sending details about interesting methods, strategies or reflections that you have encountered/experienced, or by writing a post for the upcoming edition.

Contributions to the vignette should be 300 words and should cover: what the method is, how the method works, why it works as well as where researchers can find more information about it.

Posts for Ethnography Matters’ ‘Small Methods for Big Data’ edition should be maximum 1,000 words and can offer a series of methods or focus on a single method and reflections on the use of that method. Contributor guidelines are here but email me if you have any questions.

Deadline: Friday 4 March, 2016

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

The editors of Ethnography Matters are pleased to announce that we’re back to our regular editorial calendar for 2016. We’ve set up a new series schedule for the year, with a focus on “centers of ethnographic practice.” Centers could be geographical (such as the focus on work happening at the interdisciplinary center, Highwire, in our first edition of 2016 edited by Joe Lindley), or centered around a particular idea, method or person. Each series will evolve over two months and will be edited by one of the team or by a guest editor.

In November last year, we celebrated the four-year anniversary of the founding of Ethnography Matters. Born in November 2011, Ethnography Matters was launched when we assembled a founding group of individuals who wanted to explore how technology makes us and how we make technology. Our original goal for starting Ethnography Matters was to create a body of work about ethnography that would be accessible in plain language to the public. No paywalls. No jargon. No degree waving. We wanted to build a community across industry, academia, and civil society. In the past four years, we have had an impressive collection of 182 posts, 13 editions, 14 interviews, 3 series, and 30 methods. Posts have been cited and reproduced in numerous academic publications and books, and the site has been featured as a resource for ethnographers in books by Christine Hine, Patricia Sunderland’s and Rita Denny, Gerrish & Lathlean, Gaillet & Eble and Bucchi & Trench.

Since 2011, we’ve watched this community grow on our WordPress dashboard from 500 readers a month to 15,000. It’s not only about numbers, though. We recognise our community not only in the numbers but in the stories we regularly hear from people who look to Ethnography Matters as a resource and talking point.

All communities need a narrative for why they exist, and Ethnography Matters is no different. Ethnography matters to us because it helps to keep technological development real. We believe that technologies need to develop close to the needs and experiences of users. Technologies need to aspire – to help us to not only do what we need to do but to be better people, to help us become a better society. These ideas have always mattered, but they matter now more than ever. In recent years, we’ve witnessed the global rise of new forms of automated and flextime labor systems such as Uber, Instacart, and Seamless. Technology is becoming increasingly embedded into our daily lives, bringing with it a particular set of logics that are difficult to resist. It’s clear that we’re in the middle of yet another social transition, but the question is, into what?Read More… Ethnography celebration and retrospective: We’re back!

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Christine Hine is an early pioneer of virtual ethnography and has been at the forefront of movements towards redefining ethnography for the digital age. She is currently a Reader at the University of Surrey’s Sociology Department.

Editor’s note: In this post for our Being a student ethnographer series, I talked to Christine Hine about her forthcoming book, ‘Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday’ due out next year. In this interview, Christine talks about the current phase in virtual ethnographic practice, about what are her latest research interests, and about a framework that she believes can help ethnographers understand how to adapt their practice to suit multi-modal communication environments. 

Christine Hine recommends that ethnographers focus on the embedded, embodied and everyday Internet. Pic by dannymol on Flickr, CC BY 3.0

HF: What do you think are the key challenges that ethnographers face in trying to study the Internet today?

CH: Robinson and Schulz, in their 2009 paper, describe evolving forms of ethnographic practice in response to the Internet and digitally mediated environments. They divide this into three phases that include a) pioneering, where cyberethnographers focused on issues of identity play and a separation between online and offline identities 2) legitimizing (in which my own work is situated) where ethnographers explored the use of offline methods in the online sphere and, 3) multi-modal approaches where ethnographers are concerned with how participants combine different modes of communication.

I believe that we are still in the process of having to legitimize cyber ethnography and that multi-modal approaches are a worthy goal for virtual ethnography. The key challenge here is in understanding how to do multi-modal studies. This is especially challenging since the ethnographer’s toolkit changes with every new setting. We don’t know what that toolkit consists of because every time we do a new study, we have to choose what combination of sites, methods, writing practices and techniques we need to use.Read More… Christine Hine on virtual ethnography’s E3 Internet

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

For four years, Bradley Garrett (@Goblinmerchant) explored abandoned hospitals, railways, tunnels and rooftops as part of his PhD ethnography studying an elite group of urban explorers. 

Brad has in many ways had it all: a book deal from Verso just after finishing his PhD, a position at Oxford University to continue his research, and numerous requests for media appearances and license deals. But he has also just had one of the hardest years of his life, struggling with a backlash from some members of the urban explorer community as well as attempts by authorities to stop the publication of his book. Last month, Brad gave a talk to the newly-established Oxford Digital Ethnography Group (@OxDEG) about some of the perils of doing public ethnography. His story is a counterpoint to the uncritical enthusiasm usually espoused about this form of engagement. Public ethnography, we soon learn, can be dangerous.

Bradley Garrett’s book “Explore Everything” documents his ethnography of urban explorers

When Brad first started working on the urban explorer project, he realized (like so many ethnographers before him) that joining the community would not be easy. He couldn’t simply join other explorers without first establishing himself as trustworthy and serious. Brad needed currency. Photographs of him pictured in hard-to-reach spaces were that currency. Brad recounts that it took him about eight months of exploring mostly on his own, taking photographs of his explorations and then publishing them on his blog, Place Hacking and other forums to get an invite.

The very method used to meet the elite explorers who he ended up studying also led to exposure of a more problematic kind. Because he was sharing his photographs and field notes using his real name, Brad was increasingly seen as a spokesperson and leader of the urban explorer community among the press who, he said, “couldn’t deal with a leaderless community”. By the time him and his crew posted photographs of them climbing the Shard in London, his website crashed and he had “every national newspaper in the country trying to get photos”.Read More… Glorious Backfires in Digital Ethnography: Becoming an Urban Explorer

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

This month’s theme is about what it means to be a student ethnographer and is edited by Ethnomatters co-founder, Heather Ford (@hfordsa), a current DPhil (PhD) student who believes that she will forever be a student of ethnography.

I remember the first time I adopted an ethnographic persona – very tentatively and with a great deal of trepidation. I’d applied for a job as an ethnographer with Ushahidi after graduating from my Masters degree and was miraculously accepted – miraculous because most ethnographer jobs require at least a PhD, not to mention loads of ethnographic experience. The stars were aligned… or were they?

This was the first time that Ushahidi had hired an ethnographer; it was the first time that the funding body that would help to pay my salary had invested in ethnographic research; it was my first ethnography job and my first ethnographic project. Firsts for everyone are really exciting, and I was lucky to be working for an organisation that supported me despite my lack of ethnographic experience. But ethnography doesn’t accord with the usual tenor of development projects and we faced a number of challenges that, looking back on it now, were bound to happen; challenges that, in the end, had really good results but meant that things weren’t exactly plain sailing en route.

In my first few months at the job, I heard things like: ‘You really need to have a PhD to say you’re an ethnographer’ or: ‘Only anthropologists can claim to do real ethnography’. This was all very interesting but I’d just received a job as an ethnographer and I couldn’t exactly ask for them to take it back. So I did what I always do when faced with a crisis: I gathered a bunch of much more experienced and knowledgeable people together to help me discover what exactly it meant to be an ethnographer. I knew that there were many of us who were asking similar questions and that the “ethnography + digital/networked/technology” space was burgeoning in many quarters.Read More… November 2013: Being a student ethnographer

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Editors’ note: In this final post of our Ethnographies of Objects edition, we talk to Max Liboiron, Founding Member & Project Leader of the Object Ethnography Project (OEP). The OEP is a project to facilitate the donation of objects among strangers. You can participate in the exchange by telling a story of what attracted you to the object and what you’ll will do with it, and then anyone else can trade an object for a new story. Here, Max shares some of the site’s most interesting stories – some strange, some wonderful and some just plain heartbreaking. Circulating objects in this way shows us how objects can be performative: their meanings arise through a performance with the object in particular contexts. The material boundaries of the object are important to understand in order to imagine their possible futures, but perhaps more important are the spaces they take up in peoples’ lives – in homes, within memory, as gifts and symbolic exchanges. We can’t wait to be a part of an OEP exchange and we’re sure you will too after you read this…

This photograph is part of an object exchange run by the Object Ethnography Project. You can read the donor and exchanger’s stories and see a picture of the exchange on OEP

EM: What was the inspiration for the project? 

Originally, the Object Ethnography Project (OEP) was going to be an exchange platform for trash. NYU’s Lucrece Project was sponsoring interdisciplinary methodology projects, and I put out a call for people to create a cultural laboratory looking at waste and value. The original plan was basically an extension of my art practice: I create large-scale miniature dioramas made of trash, and people can interact with the art according to one or two rules of exchange. I use their behaviours to map spontaneous, usually non-capitalist economies.

But the OEP evolved beyond that through a collaboration with Marisa Solomon, an anthropologist, and Vincent Lai, a member of the Fixers Collective. We came together because we were all keen on waste, but we opened up the project so all sorts of objects could be part of an investigation about how terms of value are manifested via circulation and the varied relationships between people and things.Read More… An exchange platform for “trash”: Stories from the Object Ethnography Project

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Editors’ note: In our installment of August’s Ethnographies of Objects edition, we hear from Andie Tucher about the curious image below that of a ‘Silent City’ that was later found to be fake and about the celebration of faking as a response to the so-called “ultra-realism” of the time. Andie Tucher is an associate professor and the director of the Communications PhD Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Her exploration of faked photographs is part of a work in progress investigating the evolution of truth-telling conventions in journalism. A former journalist, she earned her PhD in American Civilization from New York University.

R.G. Willoughby’s mirage, the Silent City, Alaska.

In 1888 Dick Willoughby, a prospector and certified “character” in Alaska, was charging 75 cents apiece for copies of this photograph, which he said showed the mirage of a “silent city” arising from the Muir glacier. Soon, however, critics unmasked it as the image of a random English city superimposed on one of a glacier, and explicitly condemned it as a “fake.” But while that effort at faking was clearly bad, it’s also not representative of what for a brief time photographic faking was understood to be. Less than a decade after Willoughby’s disgrace, many commercial and artistic photographers were cheerily and publicly discussing how faking could be good and deliberately applying the otherwise disreputable term to a range of generally benign retouching techniques.

For my research into the evolution of conventions of journalistic truth-telling, I often find it useful to analyze the ways a particularly resonant word was used by journalists and the public in the general and professional press—the closest a historian can come to exploring social meanings through participant observation.Read More… Faked photographs and objects of journalism in the late 19th Century

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!

Editors’ note: Joe Cutbirth (@joecutbirth) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at Manhattan College, New York. He writes about politics and the media for the Huffington Post and at his home blog, joecutbirth.com, a blog by a Texas expat adjusting to life as a New Yorker. In this interview for this month’s ‘Ethnographies of Objects’ edition, Joe talks about his fascinating work investigating a particular object of journalism produced in his home state of Texas in the 1980s: the “bar rag”. Here, he talks about the journalism, the AIDS virus and what it means to live through a time in which he now is a scholar. 

EM: How can a deadly virus and a free entertainment guide become objects of journalism?

‘This Week in Texas’ cover image. March 17-23, 1979

One of the key lessons in modern media history is that journalism exists in a host of forms and delivery systems that are created and shaped by social, political, economic, and technological forces. Journalism is a term for both a set of social practices and the commodities those practices produce. Neither is static. Journalistic practices and products vary in different times and in different places and when done by different people for different audiences. They are fluid forms of inquiry that produce a fluid set of products that reflect factual events of public interest. Journalism is shaped and supported by objects. Some are innately journalistic; others are not.

Journalistic objects include cameras, tape recorders and other technologies that make it easier for journalists to practice their craft. They also include public records, news releases and other documents that assist in the inquiry that is the heart journalistic practice. So, what about nonjournalistic objects, items that aren’t created to help journalistic practice or to function as a journalistic product?

Nonjournalistic objects, such as the AIDS virus and free entertainment guides known as “bar rags,” are easy to overlook because they exist outside the routines that make up the everyday world of journalism. Yet, that very condition makes them essential to explore. A scholarly examination of the circumstances and processes that bring nonjournalistic objects into the world of journalism opens an important window into both journalistic practice and product.Read More… Objects of Journalism: Bar Rags and the AIDS Virus

Translation

English中文(简体)FrançaisEspañol

by

You can help improve the automatic translation by checking off “Edit Translation” after you select a language. Thanks!