#virtual ethnography

[thegeekanthropologist]

Anthropology Blogging 101: Archaeogaming

Anthropology Blogging 101: Archaeogaming

In this edition of Anthropology Blogging 101, we feature Andrew Reinhard, founder of Archaeogaming. His application of archaeology to virtual worlds and digital gaming platforms like World of Warcraft has been highlighted by Motherboard and Kotaku.  (more…)

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[kpeters4stuff-blog]

Smith.  (2016).

Bare writing: Comparing multiliteracies theory and nonrepresentational theory approaches to a young writer writing.  Reading Research Quarterly, 52(1), 125-140.

In this article, the author argues that new theoretical approaches to literacy are necessary for making visible the affective, embodied, and noncognitive domains of textual meaning making that are often obscured in traditional approaches. To experiment with this argument, the author conducted two analyses on the same data set, using multiliteracies theory and nonrepresentational theory as respective lenses through which to view the data.  The data were from a three-year virtual ethnographic case study that the author conducted of Emily, a young writer, while she wrote a series of young adult gothic novels. These side-by-side analyses demonstrated how different views of Emily as an author emerged through each treatment of the data. In the analysis via the multiliteracies theory, she was shown to be a shrewd consumer and designer of multimodal compositions. The analysis via the nonrepresentational theory revealed Emily’s writing to be produced through its participation with affective intensities, objects, and her haunting by novels’ characters in a process that the author calls bare writing. The author suggests that nonrepresentational theory provides an alternative model for the research of literacies that instantiates an ontological view of literacies, thereby including more people and more texts in the everyday doing of literacies.

[joachimvlieghe]

To participate in a newsgroup without revealing one's role as a researcher would, as in all cases of covert ethnography, pose a considerable ethical problem. Arguing that online interactions are sufficiently real to provide a context for an ethnographic study has an ethical corollary: online interactions are sufficiently real for participants to feel they have been harmed or their privacy infringed by researchers. The ethical dimensions of research in online settings have been much debated. The status of messages posted to a newsgroup or events in a MUD is controversial: it is questionable whether they are best seen as public statements and therefore fair game for teh researcher, or as the property of their authors and not to be appropriated for academic purposes without permission (King, 1996; Waskul and Douglass, 1996). In offline settings it is rare for a researcher to reveal the name of an informant, for fear of causing embarrassment or harm. By extrapolation, researchers in online settings have often treated user names as similarly sensitive and changed identifying details to avoid the possibility to adverse consequence. This move is in accord with an approach that treats online interactions in their own terms as real to participants. To do otherwise would be to treat online identities as if they did not matter to participants, whereas in many settings they patently do matter.

Source: Virtual Ethnography, p. 23-24 (Christine Hine, 2000)

[joachimvlieghe]

Summary

"Ethnography and Ubiquitous Digital Research" - Larry R. Irons

Central issue: Relationship between ethnography, spatiality and social media.

SPACE

As Johanna Brewer and Paul Dourish observe, “space is not simply an ‘inert container’ for the places of everyday experience; rather, space itself is the outcome of particular ways of reasoning about and representing the world.”

ETHNOGRAPHY

In other words, the specifics of the methodology matter less than its purposive application. Following Geertz, Sunderland and Denny contend, the methodologies employed, whether participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews, diaries (online or offline), village censuses, surveys, or maps, “are not ‘ethnographic’ per se, but…are made so by the intellectual framing of the task” (p.52).

The purpose of ethnographic research is as important as the methods used, as long as the sociocultural context remains in focus. For example, whether we use ethnography in marketing  or design research remains irrelevant to the methods employed. What matters is whether we develop the research questions around the assumption that sociocultural practices provide the data source for answers.

WHY DIGITAL (or virtual) ETHNOGRAPHY?

At the same time, these developments provide the potential for ubiquitous access, independent of time and location, to the recorded experiences of people creating content for friends, fun, or involving themselves in studies done by ethnographers. As a result, the relationship between spaces and places shifts in an environment of ubiquitous computing, making digital ethnographic research increasingly feasible and effective.

[frommemory-blog]