The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography

The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography

Edited by Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway & Genevieve Bell  

1. Debating Digital Ethnography, Part II

Anne Beaulieu

Computational thinking and new modes of ethnography.

Vectors for fieldwork: Computational thinking and new modes of ethnography 

Researchers using ethnographic methods have traditionally claimed, that the way methods are closely entwined with the field and objects of concern is a distinctive trait. The extent of this entwinement can vary, from co-construction, where methods, objects, field and even ethnographer emerge as part of ethnographic practice (Tsing 2005) to more instrumental versions of this entwinement, where a researcher will expect certain topics or issues of interest to become visible in the course of fieldwork (Shaffir and Stebbins 1990). In this chapter, I will propose an approach to understand accounts of methodological adaptations in ethnographic research, in order contrast different adaptations to digital tools and networked relation within a framing of computationalisation (Hayles 2002).

Readers of this volume will most likely already have particular attachments to ethnographic methods. Or perhaps some may feel some reluctance to embracing these methods in their own work or that of their students, and have picked up this volume, seeking orientation to ethnographic approaches. In any case, ethnographic methods will be associated with research practices, experiences of fieldwork and immersive ways of being a researcher. Ethnographic research is predominantly discussed as a process, a way of learning through doing, rather than simply a set of methodological prescriptions and a means to an end. This is the reason why the key intellectual and cultural movements in Western academia of the past decades—feminism, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, queer theory, etc.—have meant not only a focus on new objects or a revisiting of canons, but also deep questioning of the very process of doing ethnography. As such, adaptations and reflections on ethnographic methods pursued in relation to digital tools and networked relations could be seen as one more foil, against which ethnography rethinks its value, analyses it processes, and reconsiders its contributions.

This chapter focuses on ethnographic accounts in relation to the regime of computation, defined as the import of patterns of information as a basic unit and of computers as universal machine, as a dominant cultural condition of our times (Hayles 2002). As Pink, Horst, Postill, Hjorth, Lewis & Tacchi  highlight, ethnography has different meanings in different disciplines and these differences are represented in this volume (Pink et al. 2015). In STS, ethnographic methods, and particularly participant-observation, have been used to understand knowledge production. Being in the lab has been used as a strategy to document how social and cultural processes are entwined with epistemic claims, and to situate scientific activity as continuous with other cultural spheres and social institutions. Fieldwork has been invaluable to show the diversity of meanings attached to technologies and artifacts (Beaulieu et al 2007) and to understand the transformations in knowledge production as a result of informationalization (VKS 2008).

My own ethnographic practice has been shaped by science and technology studies, where co-presence in the lab (Beaulieu 2002; Beaulieu 2010; De Rijcke and Beaulieu 2014) has been a core strategy to understand the visual culture of laboratories and the epistemic power of informational and computational objects.

As noted, there have been crises and challenges enough in ethnography, and the approach has been reinvented and reshaped to address literary/feminist/queer turns and twists. There is, however a particular way in which the computational challenges ethnographic work. In terms of a method where the ‘ethnographer is the instrument’, some of the central claims of computational regimes pose a radical challenge. Presence and engagement, two key elements of ethnographic approaches, have been formulated according the liberal humanist tradition that links the ethnographer as investigating, learning and knowing subject to embodiment. In a computational regime, where informational patterns are privileged over material instantiations, bodies matter less and less (Hayles 1999), therefore posing a challenge to ethnographic traditions. We will return to this issue, to consider how different starting points for presence (Beaulieu 2010) and engagement (Hayles 1999; De Rijcke and Beaulieu 2014) can actually enrich rather than threaten ethnographic approaches, and that interfaces where bodies and information meet may actually of particular interest (Hayles 1999). For now, the point is that one important challenge of computational ethnography is that not only the methods but also the ethnographer as instrument is problematized, and that this problematization takes the form of an opposition between physical embodiment and informational modes.

Rethinking ethnography and digital technology

There is no dearth of reflections, explorations and experiments in ethnography, in relation to digital technologies and networked contexts. Prominent works that have explored the feasibility and consequences of embracing these new forms abound, among which the seminal ‘proof of concept’ Virtual Ethnography (Hine 2000) put forth a number of adaptations of ethnographic methods to the internet. Several collections on methods to study digital practices and virtual settings have included ethnographic methods as an important part of the researchers ‘toolbox’ (Markham and Baym 2009; Hine 2005).  In other words, digital and networked settings and practices have been the focus or part of ethnographic research for well over a decade, even in the most traditional bastions of anthropological work. A diversity of ethnographic approaches have also widely been recognized as providing valuable insights in to the study of internet and digital culture, broadly defined. Among all this literature, richly documented across this volume, some authors insist on the continuities in cultural practices that endure into the digital (Miller and Slater 2000), while others stress the novel possibilities for human culture (Boellstorff et al. 2012).

But across this divide between those who would signal discontinuities and breaks and those who insist on the robustness of cultural forms, all authors share a commitment to ethnographic approaches and faith in the resilience the approach to successfully meet any challenges an informational world might throw at it. More interesting than the potential of ethnographic methods to fail or succeed is the way of talking about the value of ethnographic for doing work in digital settings or with digital objects.

As widely noted, there are many different contexts and many different disciplines in which ethnography is used. But besides this diversity of theoretical frameworks and epistemic goals for ethnography, there is also a certain hesitation, maybe even a taboo, to pin down ethnographic methods too tightly. This is attributed to the openness of ethnographic approac