Digital Ethnography

Unravelling knowledge practices: the assistances and resistances of ANT

by Sanna Rimpilainen

Co-authored with Terrie Lynn Thompson, University of Alberta, Canada

As work and workplaces become increasingly distributed, professional knowing practices are more complex and now... more As work and workplaces become increasingly distributed, professional knowing practices are more complex and now reflect an interconnected array of people, ideas, technologies, and other objects. Indeed, sociomaterial sensibilities suggest that it takes both human and nonhuman actors to enact any practice. Actor Network Theory (ANT) is part of the contemporary turn to the relational and material and is well suited to studying hybrid and fluid practices, including connectivity between diverse network elements and the effects generated by such connections.

Yet, not only are approaches to studying these gatherings and heterogeneous processes not well developed, the researcher’s toils in this respect are not often evident in ANT accounts. Having engaged with ANT in our own research, we have learned that it is often challenging to actually apply these approaches to one’s own research questions, methodology, and data. This paper focuses on how we drew on ANT to examine knowing practices of professionals in different work settings and how ANT assisted and resisted our efforts in doing this. We explore more nuanced approaches for the popular ANT edict to “follow the actors” and the importance of attending to multiple and contradictory realities enacted in knowing practices.

We draw on two empirical studies to inform our discussion. Thompson’s research examines how the everyday online work-related learning and knowing practices of the contingent workforce (i.e., self-employed workers) are changing as web and mobile technologies become integrated into globally distributed work-learning spaces. Web-enabled and mobile knowledge spaces are diverse, diffuse, often quite messy, and end up evoking questions of inclusion. Using several ANT-influenced heuristics in an effort to “interview” objects, Thompson examined practices in which human entanglements with objects, such as the posting, the delete button and one’s digital footprint work to shape the learning practices enacted in online spaces. ANT was also used to question the politics of such assemblages. Rimpiläinen carried out a longitudinal, ethnographic case-study, following the unfolding processes of educational research and technology development in an interdisciplinary higher education project called Ensemble, which studied case-based learning in order to develop semantic technologies to support that learning. By drawing on ANT as theoretical practice, approaching the topic through critical ethnographic participation, and using multiple methods for data generation and accumulation, Rimpiläinen opened up to scrutiny the practices, the doing of research and technology development, and was able to trace the emergence of a piece of educational technology through the multiple, at times competing and conflicting, knowledge practices enacted in the project.

Deciding to engage with ANT propels the researcher down a path, influencing the questions asked, the way researchers explore phenomena, what is attended to, how one understands and thinks with their data, and how it might be represented. By exploring the philosophical and practical tensions generated in ANT-influenced research, we hope to create an opportunity for conference participants to interrupt their own knowledge practices as researchers and educators.

BOOK REVIEW of Ethnographically Speaking: Autoethnography, Literature, and Aesthetics

by Thalia Mulvihill

History in the making: The NBN roll-out in Willunga, South Australia

by Melissa Gregg

Forthcoming in Jock Given and Gerard Goggin (eds) ‘Australian and New Zealand Internet Histories’ Special Issue of Media International Australia, May 2012.

The 2010 press release announcing the first-release sites for Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) identified... more The 2010 press release announcing the first-release sites for Australia’s National Broadband Network (NBN) identified five locations chosen for their contrasting ‘housing density, housing type, geography, climate and local infrastructure’ (nbnco.com.au). On these measures, the South Australian town of Willunga was described as a ‘small rural town’ with ‘dispersed housing’. It thus served as a model for the country constituencies crucial to securing support for the Federal Government’s large-scale infrastructure investment. But what else is there to know about Willunga that made it an ideal first-release site? Are there local histories that shed light on the decision to grant its residents access to high-speed broadband before the rest of the country? This paper shares findings from ethnographic research conducted in Willunga during the 2011 NBN roll-out to answer these questions.

Blommaert 2009 A market of accents

by Jan Blommaert

Euskal identitatearen garapena online sare sozialen bidez: gazteen praktika sozialak Facebooken

by Koldo D. Bizkarguenaga

(Forthcoming 2012) Gogoa Aldizkaria

Egungo euskal gizarte postmodernoan emandako dinamikotasun eta dikotomien gainditzeak, instituzioek jasandako indar... more Egungo euskal gizarte postmodernoan emandako dinamikotasun eta dikotomien gainditzeak, instituzioek jasandako indar galtzeak eta subjektu erreflexiboaren ‘enpoderamenduak’, besteak beste, identitate nazionala aztertzeko, ulertzeko, eta garatzeko logika, moduak, espazioak, tresnak eta erreferente kulturalak transformatu ditu. Artikulu honen bidez, elementu horiek euskal identitatearen kasura mugatuz, hauek identifikatu eta aztertzeaz gain, soziologikoki hau ikertzerako orduan egin beharreko ikergaldera birpentsatu nahi da euskalduntasuna irudikatzeko moduak eta euskal kolektibotasuna argitu nahi direlarik.

Investigative Management and Consumer Research on the Internet

by Peter Lugosi

A final version of this paper will be published as Lugosi, P., Janta, H. and Watson, P. (2012) Investigative Management and Consumer Research on the Internet. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management Vol. 24, No. 6. Please consult the final published version if citing.

This paper introduces the notion of Investigative Research on the Internet (IRI) and conceptualises its processes... more This paper introduces the notion of Investigative Research on the Internet (IRI) and conceptualises its processes through the principle of streaming. It discusses the similarities and differences between IRI and netnography and considers various aspects of the IRI process, including site selection, sampling, data collection and analysis. It is argued that streaming can help to understand the processes involved in conducting netnographic research. Moreover, it is suggested that streaming is a more appropriate way to conceptualise some internet-based studies that do not conform to netnographic or ethnographic ideals. Three international empirical cases are used to illustrate the application of IRI and streaming in research on international workers, consumer cultures and on emerging business phenomena.

“We’re superhuman, we just can’t spell.” Using the affordances of an online social network to motivate learning through literacy in dyslexic sixth-form students.

by Owen Barden

Full EdD Thesis

This is a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a Sixth Form College in... more This is a study of the use of Facebook as an educational resource by five dyslexic students at a Sixth Form College in north-west England. Through a project in which teacher-researcher and student-participants co-constructed a Facebook group page about the students’ scaffolded research into dyslexia, the study examines the educational affordances of a digitally-mediated social network. An innovative, flexible, experiential methodology combining action research and case study with an ethnographic approach was devised. This enabled the use of multiple mixed methods including participant-observation, interviews, video, dynamic screen capture and protocol analysis. This range of methods helped to capture much of the depth and complexity of the students’ online and offline interactions with each other and with Facebook as they contributed to the group and co-constructed their Facebook page. The philosophy and concepts of the New Literacy Studies and multimodality (Cope & Kalantzis, 2000; Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996, Kress 2010), and rigorous qualitative analytical procedures are used to construct a substantive grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) of the students’ engagement with the social network and hence its educational potential. The study assesses the students' motivation to learn through literacy, the role of identities, and considers the pedagogical principles their use of the network evokes. It concludes that Facebook offers an affinity space which engages the students in active, critical learning about and through literacy (Gee, 2004 & 2007). Little if any research has apparently been documented on the potential of digital media to engage and motivate dyslexic students, nor to integrate models of dyslexia, radical perspectives on literacy and social models of disability (Herrington & Hunter-Carsch, 2001). This study begins to address this oversight and imbalance.

NeoReality, Ubiquitous Publishing and new perceptions of space/time/identity

by Salvatore Iaconesi

co-authored with Oriana Persico, published in Rivista delle Scienze Sociali, issue 2, 2011.  ISSN 2239-1126

On OCtober 15th in Rome the large protest stimulated by the Spanish Indignados and by the Occupy Wall Street movement... more On OCtober 15th in Rome the large protest stimulated by the Spanish Indignados and by the Occupy Wall Street movement took place along several different planes, traversing the city in different ways.

The analysis of the activity on social networks in the time/space of the protest shows with extreme clarity a continuous mutual penetration between digital and analog worlds, pushing us to hypothesize the possibility of a liquid, mutating fusion of the two dimensions, defining a new city in which the worlds of molecules and bits merge and flow together.

This observation becomes the opportunity to redefine the concept of publishing, transforming it into a domain which is able to traverse arts and sciences in the creation of knowledge, educatio, culture, information and awareness processes focused onto the enactment of concepts such as ubiquity, multiplicity and emergency.

Ethnography, education and on-line research (OLR)

by Christopher Walsh

Jeffrey, Bob; Bradshaw, Pete; Twining, Peter and Walsh, Chris (2010). Ethnography, education and on-line research. In: European Conference of Educational Research, 25-28 August 2010, Univesity of Helsinki, Finland.

This paper is an attempt to establish the methodological basis for carrying out ethnographies of online education... more This paper is an attempt to establish the methodological basis for carrying out ethnographies of online education communities, in particular in the Continuing Professional Development VITAL project co-ordinated by the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at The Open University www.vital.ac.uk/

Bridging ethnography and engineering through the graphical language of Petri nets

by Pierre Fastrez

Coauthored with Erwin R. Boer, Deborah Forster, Carrie A. Joyce, Jean-Baptiste Haué, Monal Chokshi, Elaine Garvey, Tayopa Mogilner, and Jim Hollan
Presented at 'Measuring Behavior 2005 - 5th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research', Wageningen, The Netherlands.

Both ethnographers and engineers deal with contextual and situational complexity in human behavior. For engineers,... more Both ethnographers and engineers deal with contextual and situational complexity in human behavior. For engineers, this complexity creates challenges in designing systems to support humans that are useful and predictable across a wide range of contexts because of the difficulty to analyze and model the contextual impact on observable behavior. The rich descriptive understanding found in the annotated case studies of ethnography could be of substantial use here, however, the ethnographer’s language is considerably different from that of the causal systems and input/output models typical of engineering. Through a unique collaboration between automotive engineers and UCSD ethnographers, we employed a common graphical state-space based modeling language called Petri nets that enables annotated case studies to be represented in a computational framework that can be used in standard engineering practices. The ethnographer’s goal was to explain and quantify the importance of context on driver behavior such that the engineers would be better able to design useful human-centered support systems and to assess whether those necessarily practically constrained support systems will most likely function as expected across a wide range of situations. This paper offers a discussion of the issues that arise in bridging the gap between engineering and ethnographic practice in the context of lane change behavior analysis.

A collaborative approach for human-centered driver assistance systems

by Pierre Fastrez

Co-authored with Joel McCall, Ofer Achler, Jean-Baptiste Haué, Mohan Trivedi, Jim Hollan, and Erwin Boer
Published in 'Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems', 2004

This paper describes an interdisciplinary research collaboration to design a human-centered driver assistance system.... more This paper describes an interdisciplinary research collaboration to design a human-centered driver assistance system. Driving behavior is captured using a novel intelligent vehicle test bed. The synchronized capture of driver behavior and driving context provides an empirical basis for design and evaluation.

Thoughts on blogging as an ethnographic tool

by Mary-Helen Ward

The Rongorongo Script: On a Listed Sequence in the Recto of Tablet “Mamari”. Part 2

by Martyn Harris

Co-authored with Tomi S. Melka.
Published in Journal of Quantitative Linguistics Volume 18, Issue 3, 2011

In Harris and Melka (2011a), we identified a fragment of text on the ‘‘Mamari’’ tablet (Cb) which echoes a short... more In Harris and Melka (2011a), we identified a fragment of text on the ‘‘Mamari’’ tablet (Cb) which echoes a short section of a verbal list-like formula recorded by Englert (1948) concerning the kills made by warriors during battle. We highlighted the possible
correlation between ‘‘frigate bird’’ /600/ and ‘‘fish’’ /700/ glyphs and their presence in delimiter lists (Barthel, 1958; Horley, 2007) through an analysis based on the whole RR corpus, and a reduced corpus of texts, which we propose relate to the same literary genre; the ika and timo genres (see Routledge, 1919; Fischer, 1997). We presented the ethnographic data (Harris & Melka, 2011a), a Key Word In Context concordance, and explained the methods adopted for a further statistical analysis of these glyphs as a concordance is not normally used to demonstrate significance, without some statistical measure to support it.

In this paper, we present the final results, and demonstrate that there is some evidence to assume that these two glyphs /600/ and /700/ are highly correlated in other fragments of text across the RR corpus, as either separate constituents /600/ and /700/, with one or more intervening glyphs, or as part of a compound form /605/, or /606/, requiring the ‘‘hand’’ glyph /006/ to appear before the ‘‘fish’’ glyph /700/.

Furthermore, we propose that these glyphs suggest the presence of ika lists – a record of warriors killed in battle – and timo – vengeance chants imbued with the power to bring death upon the named victim. What these inscription types share are the presence of proper names, which may be indexed by glyphs /430/ and /530/ previously identified by Davletshin (2002), as possible ‘‘title’’ glyphs.

Although this study highlights many observations made by previous research (Pozdniakov, 1996; Guy, 1998; Davletshin, 2002; Horley, 2007) through palaeographic methods and frequency analysis, this paper attempts to take this further by adopting multivariate methods from lexicographic and latent semantic statistical methods. These methods are useful for reducing noise created by an inadequate transliteration scheme (Barthel, 1958), and issues associated with frequency analyses over a corpus of texts of variable length. The results in this paper also show these methods correspond to observations made by previous analyses based on palaeographic methods.

Technopotters and Webs of Clay: Digital Possibilities for Teaching Ceramics

by Courtney Weida

published in The Teaching Artist Journal, 2007

The digital possibilities for ceramics included here primarily address documenting ceramic education processes,... more The digital possibilities for ceramics included here primarily address documenting ceramic education processes, building and engaging communities, and extending studio activities into the web space. In this context, “digital” is meant to refer to computer technologies: especially relating to web resources. These digital possibilities are explored as a challenge to the dichotomy of real and tactile clay versus removed and virtual Internet that sometimes arises when considering clay and computers. In this paper, I will argue that web and real-world communities in ceramics are characterized by similar qualities. Additionally, this research addresses the curricular issue of how web resources may supplement ceramic art history and extend student-centered learning. Finally, this paper will also explore the nature of the interplay between computer technology and clay.

The Ethnological Archive: Memory and Technology

by Liviu Pop

Co-authored with Nora Sava, published in Philobiblon Vol. XV (2010).

This paper presents an analysis of the ethnological archive, in relation to time, from two points of view: of the... more This paper presents an analysis of the ethnological archive, in relation to time, from two points of view: of the content and storing of archived information. The material encompasses two distinct, but complementary, methodological settings: the first is an anthropological study and the second one is a technical approach on the digital archive. This research is an application on the archive of the Folklore Club of the Faculty of Letters, Babe􏰁-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.

Digital Distrust: Uzbek cynicism and solidarity in the Internet age

by Sarah Kendzior

American Ethnologist Vol. 38 No. 3, August 2011, pp. 559-575

In this article, I examine how Uzbek exiles have used the Internet to attempt to forge solidarity in a political... more In this article, I examine how Uzbek exiles have used the Internet to attempt to forge solidarity in a political culture of cynicism and distrust. Tracing the development of internal divisiveness in the Uzbek political opposition, I show how cynicism has been reconstituted as an essential part of Uzbek political integrity, and then I examine how some dissidents have attempted to counteract this cynical political culture through the online promotion of a new political repertoire. I argue that the Internet changes patterns of political dissent by allowing greater interaction between geographically dispersed, like-minded parties but also allows the doubts and antagonisms that existed within those parties to be more easily perceived and, in some cases, exacerbated.

Ciudadanía Digital

by Jairo Alberto Galindo Cuesta

Galindo, Jairo Alberto

Ciudadanía digital
Signo y Pensamiento, Vol. XXVIII, Núm. 54, enero-junio, 2009, pp. 164-173
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana
Colombia

Digital Citizenry

To think the city under the spectrum of it penetration,
forces us to consider... more Digital Citizenry

To think the city under the spectrum of it penetration,
forces us to consider aspects such as the constitution
(in it-self) of concepts like citizen and citizenship. In
this document some particularities of this approach
are considered, and it purports that teachers, as digital
citizens, should encourage this approach in order to
continue the education process outside the classroom,
in the city, as a proper space to build an information
and knowledge society.

La construcción de ciudad bajo el espectro de la pene-
tración de las tic obliga a considerar aspectos como
la propia constitución de los conceptos ciudadano y
ciudadanía. En este artículo se abordan algunas par-
ticularidades de esta aproximación y se busca que el
docente, como ciudadano digital, fomente este enfoque
para continuar con la educación fuera de las aulas, en la
ciudad, como espacio de construcción de una sociedad
de la información y del conocimiento.

Keywords: City, digital, information society, digital
citizenry, education.

Palabras Clave: Ciudad, digital, sociedad de la infor-
mación, ciudadanía digital, educación.

Neoliberal digitality, leisure and labour in an MMOG: An ethnography and analysis

by Tamara Peyton

MA (Sociology) thesis. Successfully defended March 2010

How does the massively-multiplayer online gameworld (MMOG) of World of Warcraft (WoW) refute or reflect the capitalist... more How does the massively-multiplayer online gameworld (MMOG) of World of Warcraft (WoW) refute or reflect the capitalist leanings of the neoliberal culture in which it is situated? How does this understanding of gaming as suspect leisure feed out into the everyday understood associations between gaming, leisure, labour, and being in a neoliberal context? Using these questions as a foundation for investigation, this thesis analyzes connections between gameworld participation as an activity, the WoW gameworld as a lived environment, and that activity and gameworld‘s relation to leisure, labour and being, and demonstrates how these understandings commit at least one of four ontological errors. By situating gameworld participation as a set of hybrid work-leisure practices that re-inscribes neoliberalism, this thesis will describe how MMOG participation is an activity that is a full corroboration of the work, consumption and action orientations of western neoliberal capitalism.

The Rongorongo Script: On a Listed Sequence in the Recto of Tablet “Mamari” Part 1

by Martyn Harris

Co-authored with Tomi S. Melka.
Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. Volume 18, Issue 2, 2011

Rongorongo, the undeciphered writing system of Rapanui (Easter Island) has received a lot of attention in the last 12... more Rongorongo, the undeciphered writing system of Rapanui (Easter Island) has received a lot of attention in the last 12 months with new studies tackling the “Mamari” (see Horley, 2009a; Melka, 2010a) and the “Keiti” tablets (see Horley, 2010; Wieczorek, 2011). The “Mamari” section is a potential “lunar series” (see Barthel, 1958a; Barthel, 1971, p. 1183; Guy, 1990); however more work is needed to ascertain whether “Keiti” reflects to some extent the same genre.

In this study we look to other inscriptions in the corpus for the possible presence of the ika and timo genres (see Routledge, 1919; Fischer, 1997). After a review of the ethnographic data, in combination with a statistical analysis, we propose that one group of tablets that may reflect these genres are Gv, Ia, and Ta. The analysis focuses on a number of identified sequences that show examples of glyph /700/ across the rongorongo corpus.

A mixed-methods approach has been adopted since it has the potential to coalesce advantages in terms of ethnography, text analysis and statistics. This is especially true when one has a lot of factors to consider, and errors tend to build up in the company of the unidentified data, of possibly contaminated folkloric and fragmented informants' material, of abstruse glyphic combinations, and of an imperfect system of transliteration (see Guy, 2006, p. 53).

Second Looks at Second Life: Considerations on the Conservation of Digital Ecologies

by Dennis Moser

The text source for the presentation @ "Cultural Heritage Online, Firenze 2009"