week 9: publications, representations, disseminations…
5May 28, 2012 by jfenn@uoregon.edu
Apologies for getting this up a bit later than I had intended, but nonethelss you now have a place to park comments and thoughts on this week’s topic for class. We’ll continue exploring ways in which “digital” provides us with unique and potentially insightful means for presenting ethnographic work. What are the impacts of such malleable and portable publication strategies when it comes to methods?
Category discussion prompt, Spr2012 | Tags: discussion, presentation, reading, resources
As I am prepping for comics school (stocking up on art supplies, downloading maps of Chicago, and building the required playlist of music I like to work to), I have been thinking about the intersections between media production and research.
At comics school, I’m in charge of a three hour workshop block on media criticism and comics. In some ways prepping for it feels familiar – find a text, read it, write discussion questions, present. In some ways it feels very unfamiliar – now I am presenting my work in a very different context, to a different audience (some other grad students in attendance – but “grad student” won’t be the primary hat we’ll be wearing) and I’m a little overwhelmed by the range of ways I could present.
I often joke that one can tell the type of conference by the dominant presentation style – reading a full paper from the page, note cards, powerpoint, prezi, posters, performance art, etc. But it seems like there are many more ways we could present our work. Maybe we should look to the blog on the ideological baggage of social science research methods. If we understand our methods to be a part of our intervention (in that they will build the world we will then look at), we might also understand our presentation as part of that work. Presentation styles ,then, would also come “politically preloaded.”
Selfishly, I am trying to find a rationale for somehow combining my artwork with my critical practice. Given the landscape of peer review and the conservative pace of change in academia in general, I’m not overly hopeful. But perhaps this links up with taking our research to our subjects and taking our subjects’ own media production seriously. An academic book is still just a book. Perhaps, thinking of myself as a media producer rather than a researcher would clear enough space to tell the stories I want to tell.
As I work on my master’s project called Cultureboard (a tool for digitally collecting and sharing digital culture-based artifacts of all types), I continue to explore methods for collecting, sharing and presenting yet often run into challenges pertaining to the big picture. How can I make the collecting experience and data labeling toolset robust enough for academia and the common facebook user? Will the gamified experience engage or divide participants, particularly those who have a more serious/conservative set of expecations? Should the presentation have an option to be ungamified? The whole purpose of Cultureabord is to share “finds” but should users be allowed to “hoard” artifacts for themselves in private groups/sub-communities? It seems that anything related to open publication and sharing should be integrated with the social/open graphs, but what about privacy and appropriate sourcing/citation? If someone captures an amazing artifact, will this person’s “find” stay with him/her throughout the life of the artifact, as it passes from network to network, device to device, and beyond? One major concern with regard to media production is ownership, not (in this case) from the copyright perspective (IP), but from the “street cred” perspective. So many users re-appropriate other peoples works and post them up as their own to reap the benefits and rewards. How can a researcher/contributor benefit from sharing/publishing across digital networks if there it is likely that his/her work could be compromised and shared without source/credit? On the other hand what opportunities might this provide to the larger picture (progress/innovation) when considering remix culture, mash-ups, and sharing-alike (digital utopian philosophy)?
To a certain extend one could regard the World Wide Web as a massive collection of ethnography and auto-ethnography. There is significant research, particularly in the School of Journalism and Communication among, scholars exploring the intersections of community, information gate keeping, and media online. Much of this work has experimented with framing and content analysis methods to examine the organic flow of content, self-publication, user interactivity, and information sharing on the web – from both alarmist and celebratory perspectives.
While much of the celebratory perspectives on the organic nature of information distribution online has heralded the ability to share a multitude of experiences across the globe, they often fail to address that web audiences often limit their information consumption to local and similar sources despite the ability to do otherwise.
However, digital publication and distribution does offer an opportunity to open ethnographies to a wider audience, to engage in a wider range of collaborative projects, and to share our data across institutions. For researchers seeking to engage in research and activist praxis with their work, digital publication and distribution creates opportunities to bypass the often elitist and limited publication options of pre-digital academic publication. For one, we now have the ability to publish our data along with our analysis, now free from the limitations of analog and print.
Before and during this class I was thinking of a number of fine and social practice artworks that have engaged the terminology of ethnography, or an artistic practice which is similar to ethnography. Social practice artwork seems to be the most relevant to the type of ethnography I practice, especially in terms of my thesis project. However, many of the presentations of this type of artwork will not work for my thesis topic on my workplace. I cannot present a lot of the data I collect online because of privacy concerns for my informants. I undertook the project with the understanding some of the data would go back to the workplace, but not to a larger community like the one that would have access to it on the web. In this case, I might try and engage some of the projects we talked about (like the Object Ethnography project) to try and think about how to take some of the abstract ideas of how workers tell stories and make an engaging digital document out of it. Ultimately this might involve taking what I learn from my thesis and applying it to another project with workers where the subject matter is less sensitive. In this way, although some data is well suited to a “traditional” for of documentation like a written thesis, some of the conclusions might manifest themselves in another type of project or document that looks more like social practice artwork and engages a different audience.
As I listen to the different conversations that emerge in class, I am happily surprise about the different backgrounds and interests that each of us brings in to the group. It is really interesting to hear how the interpretations of digital culture and ethnography is informed by each of our disciplinary backgrounds, and this is evident when discussing the presentation and dissemination of the digital ethnography analysis. However, common themes are recurrent among the different disciplines, where ethics and purposefulness of the presentation of the data is the most important issue. As many of the students in the class have mentioned, and some of the articles we have read in class reiterate, the internet and digital platforms open possibilities to engage communities in studies and self-reflections in ways that previous media and ethnographic methods had not afforded before. However, and I agree with Staci’s comments about the possibility of the internet and digital media to become an outlet for people to collect information from sources from a short proximity, meaning that perhaps the scope of information and variety might not be as broad as it could be, but perhaps this behavior can occur in any other context.
One interesting concept that kept coming back to our discussions is how the analysis can be determined by having the presentation format as one of the goals of the ethnographic work. This format might inform what methodology needs to be used in the digital ethnographic analysis and at the same time the final presentation might give new avenues for the ethnographic work to explore further analysis and collaboration from different parties.