I’ll be teaching a new course this coming spring term (2012) on digital ethnography (with a likely, but somewhat bland, title of Digital Ethnography). As a methods course preceding the establishment of a new media & culture graduate certificate, I’m thinking it iwill attend to at least two areas under the “digital ethnography” heading: doing ethnographic work using digital tools, and doing ethnographic work in the digital domain.
Barring a few reading options, this is as far as I’ve gotten in the planning. I am seeking comments and input from students (potential or otherwise) about what else the course might take on. So, please post comments here with suggested readings, methodological issues, tools you are curious about (or have used)—in short, anything that you’d love to see in a class of this sort. In that I’m imagining this class to be a collaborative experiment in general, having at least part of the syllabus co-authored/crowdsourced is fine first step in my mind. And I’ll certainly credit any/all contributions that I end up using!
Related articles
- The Principles of Virtual Ethnography (virtualethnography.wordpress.com)
- The new buzzword in marketing: Ethnography (theglobeandmail.com)
I’d like to learn a bit more about new methods for conducting research in the digital domain. Perhaps a bit of network analysis(??). However, I’m also fascinated by the methodological difficulty in studying online communities that specifically resist analysis by using tools like Tor to keep identity anonymous. How can we approach these communities? More pointedly, SHOULD we study these communities?