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FRIDAY HISTORICAL READINGS
Oct 10: Pioneers
Oct 17: Expertise
Oct 24: Cliffords
Oct 31: Danger
Nov 7: El Dorado
Nov 14: Emotions
Nov 21: Natives
M Dec 1: Assistants
Dec 5: Summary
MONDAY EXERCISES
Sep 29: Experience
Oct 6: Observation
Oct 13: Interview
Oct 20: Discomfort
Oct 27: Formal
Nov 3: Survey
Nov 10: Photo
Nov 17: Video
Nov 24: Digital
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Your final class exercise is due for today, on digital methods in ethnography. This is obviously a field with growing possibilities, but it has not yet developed any kind of coherent discourse such as exists for video or photography. And even more than video, the effective use of digital techniques in ethnography may demand more training than is possible for a brief exercise. So the assignment here has to be restricted to doing ethnography on the internet, rather than using any kind of innovative method or technology. Viz:
- Choose an internet community and formulate a question about it
- Spend a couple of hours examining their websites, social media pages, forums, or other activities online.
- By 9:00 a.m on the day of class, post a brief description of what you did, along with an analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of doing this ethnographic project over the internet, as opposed to doing fieldwork that involves direct contact with community members. Is it really ethnography if you do it all online? Does it matter?
In class, our guest will be Cyd Harrell, UX evangelist of Code for America. She will have access to your posts and will appear by video conference to comment and to answer your questions. Either while she is still on line with us or after she leaves, we will discuss the possibilities and false hopes of internet ethnography, and how it may or may not change the content or logic of moving from "there" to "here."
In preparation for this exercise, read the following:
- Kathleen Gallagher and Barry Freeman, Multi-site ethnography, hypermedia and the productive hazards of digital methods.
- Diraj Murthy, Digital Ethnography: An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research.
- Derya Kulavuz-Onal and Camilla Vasquez, Reconceptualizing fieldwork in a netnography of an online community of English language teachers, Ethnography and Education, 2013.
- Danah Boyd, Making Sense of Teen Life in Hargattai and Sandvig, Digital Research Confidential
- Emily Matchar, Why I can't stop reading Mormon housewife blogs, Salon, January 2011.
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