Week 6 prompt: people & practitioners
16May 5, 2014 by jfenn@uoregon.edu
flash ethnography: observations of a doctor’s use of mobile tech with a patient (Photo credit: Tricia Wang 王圣捷)
This week we revisit the concept of “who,” as in: who is doing digital ethnography? We’ve discussed disciplinary boundaries and designations in the past few weeks, as well as the “who” when it comes to utilizing specific methods or tools. Now, let’s focus on the idea of “practitioners” when it comes to the role of ethnographer in, around, and through digital phenomena—a set of issues we’ve certainly bumped into already, but worth contemplating further and from different angles.
Below are the three items from our reading list for this week, but don’t forget to peruse the resources tagged “week6” in our Diigo group as well. Let me know if the links here don’t work…
Helsinki Design Lab. “Ethnography Fieldguide”, n.d. http://www.helsinkidesignlab.org/dossiers/design-ethnography
Flewitt, R. “Bringing Ethnography to a Multimodal Investigation of Early Literacy in a Digital Age.” Qualitative Reasearch 11, no. 3 (2011): 293–310. http://qrj.sagepub.com/content/11/3/293
Whitehead, Tony. “What Is Ethnography? Methodological, Ontological, and Epistemological Attributes”. Ethnographically Informed Community and Cultural Assessment Research Systems (EICCARS) Working Paper Series, March 7, 2004. http://www.cusag.umd.edu/documents/WorkingPapers/EpiOntAttrib.pdf
Category discussion prompt, Spr2014 | Tags: people
Flewitt’s (2011) piece was helpful for making sense of “who” does ethnography in 2014. While the author embraces only a handful of the aspects of the digital in this account, Flewitt’s multimodal approach – in which text, still image, and video aided in creating a detailed multimodal transcript – appears to be a more holistic approach to ethnographic description and ultimately, making meaning from the process. If, as Whitehead (2004) claims, “Ethnography is a highly flexible and creative process,” (p. 5), then Flewitt’s use of multiple methodological tools allows for additional representational forms to come to light through the research practice, that, in turn, give rise to a plenitude of interpretations for interrogation. The sense of “play” created by and through this multi-layered approach gives the researcher and informant a sense of freedom, opening new and possibly unforeseen spaces in which ‘ethnography happens.’
With the introduction of digital or computerized forms, everyone from researcher(s) to participant(s) are responsible for ‘doing’ ethnography. Subjects or informants leave digital traces through Internet-based communication while (oftentimes) relating to one another in personal and private, on and offline locations with virtual participants or players as well as with the person in charge of the investigation. While the researcher’s analysis may appear somewhat one-sided in terms of the analysis, multiple persons inhabiting and embodying different spaces and forms are involved in making ethnography “a highly flexible and creative process.”
Who is an ethnographer is a great question. I was intrigued by the work of Whitehead and his conversation about what exactly is an anthropologist. I think that same idea applies to who is a digital ethnographer. It can vary greatly and depends on the outsider’s judgement. It is perceived, not absolute. The question of who the digital ethnographer is is bound up within what story that ethnographer wants to tell. If the subject matter makes for an ethnographic study, then that person is doing ethnography regardless of the discipline.”… [T]he department was considering firing me and hiring a ‘real anthropologist’. I… had not idea what he considered a ‘real anthropologist.'”
This brings me back to the work of Flewitt and the intersection between multimodality and ethnography. What makes things digital? His conception of multimodality offers the need to explore the complexities of the job of the ethnographer. No longer are there just words to contend with, but also the potential for all sorts of visual technologies that can capture information through still images, video, audio and written texts. The digital ethnographer must be versatile, willing to try new things and always having an open mind. He or she can’t simply decide to use one method and assume a full exploration of a topic. The researcher must be willing to integrate like the author did in the studying of the boy both at school and at home.
I find tension in the question “who” can do “what”. Thinking back to a sociology class from last term, Mills and Lemert, both wrote on sociological imagination and social theory, and suggest as long as one can “remove” him or herself from a situation and provide thoughtful analysis, he or she is a social theorist.* This approach has implications regarding who can “do” ethnography, and after reading the Helsinki Design Lab fieldguide, I’m more inclined to think ANYONE can do ethnography, as long as you’re thoughtful, observant, compassionate, and nonjudgmental. However, in academia, we work really long and hard (and broke) to be able to put three letters behind our name and call us experts in certain epistemological approaches and lifestyles.
The tension lies, I think, in how we approach method in academia and the effort we place in creating methodological ingroups and outgroups. Although Whitehead argues that ethnography is more than just qualitative research, I’m hard pressed to think of a quant. researcher who would accept ethnography with open arms. I think these rigid paradigms (which I’m guilty of defending as well) are a byproduct of academia, and can be really a disservice to collecting thoughtful and interesting data. #duh
Regardless, I’m working for 6+ years of graduate school, so I’ll take my degree, call myself an expert, and go get my research!
*this is an incredibly rough and simplistic summary of their pieces
The tension you just described is the same tension faced in almost every humanities discipline. Because we are not dealing in life or death decisions, like a medical doctor or nurse, we are often faced with the attitude from the general public that “anyone with an iPhone and internet access can do what you do.” It is this illusion of accessibility and lack of rigor that continues to lead people of a more scientific bent to question the validity of qualitative methods. There is a stark difference between the work pushed through a vetted, challenged, gated process and the “citizen journalist”. There will always be a place for both, but one can’t and shouldn’t replace the other. In journalistic terms, the citizen journalist might break the story first, but it is (in a perfect world) up to the professional to give the story vetted context. Academia throws up hurdle after hurdle and will constantly challenge and push back against your theories and ideas, and this forces more thorough and rigorous research. It’s true that I could throw up a blog tomorrow that professes to be doing ethnographic research, and the information might even be very thought provoking and well researched, but without any sort of peer vetting, it will never be as reliable as it could be. “Gate Keeper” has become a somewhat soiled term in the internet age, but just scrolling down your Facebook feed for 30 seconds clearly demonstrates the need for fact vetters. I believe that is the value of those over-priced letters we are all working for.
The Helsinki Design Lab group and the Whitehead article stood out for me the most this week (The Flewitt article wasn’t bad either, but I gravitate more toward the other two). I agree with Whitehead’s (22-23) conclusions regarding team oriented projects, however I do have some concern. Although, a team of people with varied backgrounds, such as the Helsinki Design Lab-although not by much-is better now than ever before considering the growth and intrusion of digital technologies, it still builds some doubt. For example, Whitehead mentions people (ethnographers) may be more skilled at “using the internet to tap into other electronic sources of information” and therefore that is their contribution to the research. While, Whitehead’s nod to the use of the internet may have been innocent since the article is from 2004, I still wonder should we be concerned if it is their only contribution? How would we know what they are collecting is appropriate or useable to the study? Further, how does the education of an ethnographer keep pace with the rapid changes in digital technology?
I’ve been thinking more about these questions lately and also because I’ve been reflecting on how I’ve witnessed this struggle within the design disciplines as a former educator and now again as student. However, I have no real answers, only more questions.
As most people have noted thus far, digital ethnography is an investigation with almost limitless possibilities as to how to approach it correctly. As discussed in Whitehead’s article, Culture is something which is extremely malleable to a given situation, and can be (and often is) mentally constructed in a unique way to each of us. This gives culturally-focused research a wide range of methodologies that can be used to effectively investigate various “cliques” of human populations and interactions, as to better understand the intricacies of our experiences in everyday life. Where the digital realm adds to this is that it adds an aspect of anonymity to the interactions, and allows those involved to often interact in a way much different from their public self.
As noted in the Helsinki Design Lab article, the push/pull factor of digital tools has drastically altered the methods of ethnographers because it acts as a powerfully connecting platform for users to feel comfortable to discuss some intimate secrets, as well as construct and reinforce their public self by creating an online (digital) personality in congruence to who they are in public. But more interestingly, often users tend to portray a vastly different personality than the one they choose to show in public, sometimes leaving other people to questioning which personality is “the real you”.
Where these two reading intersect is that the cultural background of a user is incredibly important to an ethnographer because it can provide key clues as to why a subject might choose to act or portray themselves in a certain way. But when other users are left questioning “the real you”, then we often all become an ethnographer in varying capacities because we tend to not just stop at questioning, we then begin to investigate. Where professional anthropologists/sociologists/ethnographers might attempt to control a given situation or merely observe from afar, often the everyday curious ethnographer tends to get more involved with the process and seek out first-hand reasoning for digital portrayals of self.
In thinking of “who” is doing digital ethnography, I want to engage with Teri’s post. I, too, an uncomfortable with the tension of determining “who” can do “what”. I would be curious to see how people feel about the distribution of labor in the work of digital ethnography. As Whitehead contends ethnography is open-ended, highly flexible, and requires the “daily and continuous recording of fieldnotes”. Though this, of course, does not apply to all ethnographic approaches, it raises important questions. When looking at the production of culture across multiple sites, such as digital ones like Facebook and Twitter, the fieldnotes are, in some ways, composed for us. What traditionally would be viewed as the subjects of ethnography, become co-authors who shape the insights we are able to gain. I agree with Teri’s idea that anyone can do digital ethnography – granted in digital spaces access remains limited in terms of access to digital capital. Maintaining strict notions of “who” can do ethnography seems to reinscribe a troubling power dynamic in which academics mine populations for research that ultimately serves to further the interests of the researcher and the academy as a privileged institution. It would seem to me that the expansion of sites across which one can conduct research could also lead to an expansion of who produces research.
I watched a TED talk recently (you too can watch it here: https://www.ted.com/talks/brene_brown_on_vulnerability) by Brené Brown who has a PhD in social work, but is a self-declared studier of “human connection.” During the course of this talk, she discusses her transition from the quantitative and the measurable to the qualitative and the vulnerable. She believes that “stories are data with a soul” and that she is neither a storyteller nor a researcher but both.
Ethnographers are storyteller-researchers, something Whitehead discuses in “What is Ethnography.” Ethnography, as Whitehead points out, is holistic because it includes both qualitative and quantitative, emic and etic, esoteric and exoteric; this makes ethnography a process that is about—to romanticize it a bit—the journey as much as the findings.
In discussing “who” can do ethnography, guides such as the Helsinki Fieldguide and the one published by the Library of Congress and various other floating around the internet, allow anyone to gain access to these “how-to” guides. What separates the academics from the civilians, is the analysis that follows.
When discussing “who can do ethnography,” I think it is also important to look at the “who” the “who” are working with. Ethnography is very dependent on fieldwork, and oftentimes when approaching a project, a researcher’s point of entry into a community is with a person they already know or have worked to establish a relationship with. Looking at these relationships, whether they be personal or not, adds another element to the “who” of ethnography. I also think that it is important to note that after the project is done, these relationships don’t just disappear or go-away, so the researcher has to decide how they are going to “close” the project.
In reading Flewitt’s article, I began wrestling with the issues of managing multi-modal data in qualitative research. As you may know, I am conducting a study that will take advantage of both traditional interview data, as well as information gathered from the online interactions of my respondents. Which types of online information are valid data points is something i have yet to determine. I think the social-semiotic approach illustrated in the articles provides a good approach for categorizing and analysis online data as part of a broader constellation of communications and literacies. By providing the proper contextual and historical information to my study, i can determine how a single online activity may hold dramatically different meaning for respondents with dissimilar backgrounds.
I have found it fascinating to track the evolution of new media, while seeking to integrate it into my own research on racial identity formation. Digital media have evolved from almost entirely text-based to a multi-media formation that integrates text in a more complex media ecology of interactions. In doing so this evolution has facilitated the transmission of bodily assigned racial designations, through ICTs, altering the disembodied nature of the Web 1.0. In a more visual and interactive Web 2.0 world, users now think about and perform their race, in a physical sense, when engaging in new media and online interactions. Considering this, coupling ethnographic methods with a social-semiotic approach seems valuable.
It does highlight, as the author notes, the difficulty in reporting on such findings when drafting conclusions. It seems somewhat inadequate to report in an almost completely text-based manner, the finding of a multimodal data collection efforts, Flewitt mentions the inclusion of hyperlinks to raw data as one innovations stemming from such attempts, but I wonder how multimodal research will affect scholarly publication and presentions going forward. Perhaps this is something we can discuss in class.
Whitehead suggests that “Another attribute of contemporary ethnography is the understanding that a portion of the ’realities’ that are represented in an ethnographer’s findings are constructions created not only by the observations of the ethnographer but also because of input from the host” (20). He elaborates by asserting that “‘realities’ are jointly constructed at given points in time by the ethnographer in conjunction with the people being studied” (21). This implies that ethnography relies not only the ethnographer to conduct a theoretically and methodologically informed investigator, but also the host participants. Within digital cultures, the propensity to (and, at times, the occupation with) document(-ing) one’s activities shifts the ethnographer’s role more heavily toward the ontological and epistemological roles, and away from many of the traditional methodological ones. At the same time, this propensity/preoccupation implies that cultural practitioners are increasingly engaging in behaviors that resemble digital auto-ethnography.
When reading through the Fieldwork Guide and Whitehead’s work, I found the concept of applying fieldwork theory into practice. Whitehead discusses that while he did take a course which provided an overview of fieldwork processes such as field note taking, he still did not apply the things he had learned in that class to his own fieldwork. I believe that just as the hard-science classes have lab hours, so should fieldwork classes have real-world applications of the methods and theories they are being taught. Internships should be attached to the learning process.
Discussed in Whitehead’s work, as well as in Flewitt’s, is the multimodal or multi-method approach to ethnography. Ethnography is both qualitative and quantitative, and sometimes methods exist beyond both. The discussion in the Whitehead article over the ontological and epistemological orientation of ethnography also sparked my attention. The idea that the very nature of what is being studied forms the methods, and that methods do not form the study, hits the nail on the head.
According to Whitehead, ethnography is not just another qualitative research method. Ethnography includes both qualitative and quantitative methods. The reason why he argues that is because ethnographer should employ any means necessary to create “the most holistic understanding of the cultural system or group being studied” (p.6). This holistic understanding requires a multi-method approach and the analysis of micro-level cultural practices from their specific contexts, along with the analysis of broader universal cultural categories and larger political and economic macro-level contexts, within which micro-level cultural practices are situated. This pursuit for the holistic understanding of culture resonates with Flewitt’s article about multimodality. Flewitt’ argues that boundaries of texts as units of analysis should be extended and include not only language but other modes of cultural signs such as visual, gestural, kinaesthetic modes and spatial arrangements etc. The interpretation of these multi-modal signs, again, should rely on the analysis of micro- and macro-level contexts, where the meanings of those sings emerge.
I generally agree with these authors about the necessity of holistic understanding of culture and the usefulness of methodological combination. However, I am quite skeptical about the feasibility of this kind of research, which sounds to me an ‘ideal.’ As Whitehead admits in his article, it will require an overwhelming amount of work – “more work than a single ethnographer can reasonably accomplish, no matter how long-term the research.” (p.21). Moreover, I believe that the reason why many qualitative researchers exclude quantitative methods from their methodological tool kit is not because qualitative works are easier to do than quantitative works, nor because they require less resources than their counterparts. It is rather than ontological and epistemological problems. There exist incompatible differences between positivist and constructivist view point, particularly on how they define the reality, which dictates the way of analyzing the reality and also the selection of methods. If this fundamental conflicts are just neglected and appear ostensibly compatible in a way that one complements the other, it might risk of ending up being a methodological eclecticism.
Page 296 of the Flewitt article was one to cut out and keep. I’m not sure about the three levels of ethnography concept and I’ll have to mull over the different depths of ethnographic tool use vs deep research, but that whole section had a lot of food for thought.
I wish the Helsinki Design Lab had done more to explain the design side of “design ethnography”—that was a new phrase for me. The “what is design ethnography” page is just “what is ethnography” for designers. I could see from other links on the HLD page that it’s a way to inform human-centered design, a phrase I am familiar with, but I wish they’d explained it more in their own view.
I agree with Teri that it was a great primer that does reinforce that anyone can do ethnography. It did strike me that the guide didn’t include any kind of discussion of ethics/limits/boundaries, besides “be ethical.” As we’ve found in conversation after conversation about privacy in class, determining what “being ethical” entails and defining limitations is a huge part of the preparation for (modern) scholars before they head out on any fieldwork.
We’ve spent a lot of time discussing how digital ethnography is the use of digital tools to access our ethnographic subjects in a more holistic way, and/or to access entirely online communities or phenomena. But in reading Whitehead et al, I wondered how often digital ethnography is part of the “abandonment of ethnography” that they lament. A lack of funds “has often led the adoption of a single qualitative research method, and one that is cheap and can be quickly completed.” As the Valentine example last week showed there are cases in which digital ethnography can be the best tool on the table for a given project, but I’d bet that digital methods are increasingly used as a substitute for in-depth in-person fieldwork in situations when funding does not allow for travel, equipment or time for traditional methods.
Thinking about who does ethnography in this week’s readings, I kept coming back to a tension that Flewitt points out early on: that ethnography “risks making rather than reflecting culture.” I think you can trouble this tension quite quickly, but it’s nevertheless an important one to keep in mind. In the case of the Helsinki Design Lab, the use of ethnography is not only about inputs but also about outputs. They’re upfront that while their “missions and strategies may be well formulated, they do not always necessarily match up with society.” When your mission is to think about things that are not on “society’s mind right at this moment,” and you represent only .0022% of a country can you make “a meaningful change”? Flewitt’s call to engage with the textual artefacts of different spaces in multimodal improvisation brings these two acts – creation and reflection into helpful conversation I think, pointing to the importance of considering “where the boundaries of text are drawn, depending on the scope and focus of the research endeavour.” So that even if you’re trying to avoid webs of significance, and maybe taking a multimodal approach to a multimodal world, who is actually doing the ethnography (as we have talked about in these comments) also scatters and becomes porous.
I gathered from the Whitehead article that the digital ethnographer’s role is similar to that of a ethnographer working in the traditional sense of conducting on-site fieldwork where interactions with community members happen face-to-face and field notes are recorded in a journal. In both cases, the researcher must ‘maintain a flexible approach’ while grounding his or her observation within the larger context (Whitehead, p.20). While the tools used and social contexts explored in online environments may vary starkly from those w/o a strong technological presence, the driving force behind ethnography remains the same. As a practitioner investigating the complex layers of social research, the digital ethnographer should consider multiple perspectives, employ the creative use of multiple resources, and harvest an open-ended approach especially when framing the onset of his/her work.
A few things stood out to me in reiteration of points from the readings and our class discussions; in conducting ethnography, “both participant (emic) and researcher (etic) perspectives should be valued” (Flewitt, p.296), “we are presently at a point in the historical-cultural development of literacy where we don’t really know how to deal educationally with these new literacies” (Lankshear & Knobel as cited by Flewitt, p.297), and you “need to find people from different parts of the organization to get a systematic and holistic idea of the issue and the opportunity” (Sitra, p.6). By considering these guiding principles in the field, you become more aware of the challenges faced by ethnographers who strive to maintain an ethical approach to research in contemporary society. But what about the children who are becoming more technologically literate at an earlier age? Are they ‘doing digital ethnography’ before even necessarily understanding distinctive research methods? Surely they are capable, although I do believe this is where the historical-cultural component must come into play. My experience as an art educator has taught me that we have a lot to learn and value from the youth – new ways of approach, new ways of perceiving and structuring ideas, all of which question methods rooted in traditional practice – yet, without standards and working definitions we have no frame of reference for which to guide these inquiries. That being said, I believe anyone is capable of practicing digital ethnography, it is the extent to which they measure their efforts against the efforts of professionals in the field that justifies the validity of their research.
Whitehead article “What is ethnography” stood out for me the most this week. If relating to this week’s theme (who is doing digital ethnography), I think Whitehead tries to make the point that it is not just qualitative researcher who does ethnography, not methodologist who reflects and applies ethnography, and ethnographer does not have to be restricted to either insider or outsider of the culture . So from this article, people can get a sense that Whitehead is very umbious and tries to demonstrate it is “researcher” who do ethnography. This expansion of the definition of ethnographer is very helpful for me to think about what digital ethnography is and what digital ethnographer does. At this level, the classical debates about whether it is possible for digital ethnographer to understand culture or theories of culture seems irrelevant, and the debates on whether digital ethnographers’ approach to study virtual communities can be qualified to “thick description” seems a bit outdated as well. So this article is very useful to open my mind and to re-interpret what digital ethnography is and who digital ethnographers are.