Digital Ethnography
Enter a social world. Follow its routines, relationships, and movements across media. Build an account that shows how people make a shared life through digital practices.
What you will learn
- Frame a question about digitally mediated social life.
- Define a workable field across connected settings.
- Negotiate entry, participation, and research relationships.
- Connect digital traces, elicited accounts, and fieldnotes.
- Analyse practices in relation to platforms and everyday contexts.
- Write a credible, reflexive, and ethically considered account.
Plan the field: Sections 1–5 connect the question, field boundaries, entry, and ethical decisions.
Observe and interpret: Sections 6–10 follow a fictional neighbourhood news group.
Write and apply: Use Sections 11–13 for reporting guidance, the lecture, fieldwork tasks, and readings.
Understand digital ethnography
Digital ethnography investigates how people live, relate, and make meaning through digital technologies and practices. It develops cultural understanding through sustained engagement with people, activities, settings, and the conditions that connect them.
A researcher might join the routines of a gaming group, follow how neighbourhood news is checked, or investigate how families use messages and video calls to maintain relationships. The question concerns how those practices work in people’s lives: the expectations, skills, relationships, and meanings that make them possible.
The lecture emphasises participation, fieldnotes, and deepening cultural understanding. A post becomes more intelligible when we know what preceded it, who is expected to respond, which expressions carry shared meanings, and how members recognise appropriate conduct.
A member places a question mark beside a forwarded notice. Others pause before sharing it. An ethnographer asks how that mark acquired its meaning, who can use it effectively, and how the group deals with disagreement about the notice.
Connect traces with lived practices
Digital activity leaves material such as posts, chat exchanges, recordings, images, and platform-generated counts. These traces can support inquiry. Ethnographic understanding grows through relating them to observed practices, participants’ accounts, and the researcher’s developing knowledge of the setting.
A collection of posts might support a content analysis. An ethnographic question also asks how posting fits into collective life. It may examine the work before publication, the relationships through which a contribution gains recognition, or the consequences of a correction.
Follow relevant connections
Digital practices can involve bodies, places, devices, employment, domestic routines, and unequal opportunities to participate. A neighbourhood volunteer may check a message while travelling, discuss it at a meeting, and publish a response later. The field should make these relationships visible where they matter to the question.
Locate the research approach
Several traditions study digitally mediated social worlds ethnographically. Their terms signal particular histories and emphases. Explain the approach you adopt and the practices through which you carry it out.
The lecture moves among digital ethnography, virtual ethnography, connective approaches, and netnography. These provide useful starting points for identifying what the research will follow and how the field will be understood.
On a small screen, swipe the table horizontally.
| Term | Useful emphasis | Implication for the study |
|---|---|---|
| Digital ethnography | Digital practices within people’s experiences, relationships, activities, and material surroundings. | Choose methods that illuminate those relationships and explain the role of digital technologies. |
| Virtual ethnography | Ethnographic engagement with mediated environments, presence, and social interaction. | Explain how participation and cultural understanding develop in the chosen setting. |
| Connective or online/offline approaches | Movement and relationships across settings, media, institutions, and everyday encounters. | Follow relevant connections while negotiating access and maintaining workable boundaries. |
| Netnography | A methodological tradition associated with Robert Kozinets for studying online cultures and socialities. | Use its methodological and ethical guidance explicitly when naming the study netnographic. |
Begin with the social practice
Pink and colleagues organise digital ethnography through experiences, practices, things, relationships, social worlds, localities, and events. This offers several possible starting points. A study can follow a practice such as checking local news or a relationship such as maintaining friendship across distance.
Hine’s account of an embedded, embodied, and everyday internet helps place digital activity within the circumstances of living. The research question determines which connections require investigation.
Recognise the range of environments
Forums, messaging groups, livestreams, collaborative documents, multiplayer games, and immersive virtual worlds offer different kinds of presence and interaction. Avatars and navigable spaces may be central in a virtual world; a neighbourhood chat may organise presence through names, response patterns, and local knowledge.
Frame and bound the field
An ethnographic field is built through decisions about people, practices, relationships, places, and time. A digital field may cross several platforms while remaining focused on a clearly defined problem.
Research question: “How do members establish a credible local witness when checking neighbourhood news across a public page, a private coordination chat, and everyday encounters?”
Practice to follow: Checking reader-submitted notices before publishing an update.
Initial unit: A checking episode, from a submitted notice to a decision about how to respond.
Distinguish platform, group, and field
A platform is an infrastructure through which interaction occurs. A group is one social arrangement within or across infrastructures. The research field includes the relationships and activities selected because they illuminate the question. These may extend beyond a single group page.
Readers ask questions and see the published update.
Volunteers assess the notice and decide what can be shared.
A member visits the stop or explains the notice’s local context.
Set boundaries you can explain
- People: Moderators, active volunteers, newer members, and others whose participation helps answer the question.
- Activity: Notice-checking episodes, including routine decisions, disputes, and corrections.
- Settings: Specified public and private spaces, with relevant meetings or local encounters where access is agreed.
- Time: A justified period and observation rhythm that can reveal recurrence and change.
- Connections: A rule for deciding when to follow a link, person, or discussion into another setting.
Use purposive selection to seek relevant positions and episodes. Broaden or deepen the field when an emerging question warrants it. Record why a new setting was added, what access it required, and how the change affected the study.
The study follows ______ among ______. The initial field includes ______ during ______. We will follow further connections when ______. Material outside ______ will remain beyond the study unless the design and access arrangements are revised.
Negotiate cultural entry and participation
Cultural entry involves learning how a setting works and establishing a research role that participants can understand. Access develops through relationships, communication, practical competence, and sensitivity to local expectations.
Prepare before joining
Learn the setting’s purpose, membership arrangements, moderation rules, language practices, rhythms, and ways of addressing newcomers. Read material that is appropriately available for preparation. Identify who can discuss access and what participants are likely to expect from a researcher.
For the fictional group, a researcher might begin by discussing the study with moderators, preparing a clear explanation for members, and agreeing how the research presence will remain visible as membership changes. The explanation should cover participation, recording, quotation, and ways to ask questions or decline.
Define what participation will involve
A researcher may read discussions, attend agreed meetings, ask questions, and undertake a suitable role where it helps the inquiry. Record how that role changes the encounter. Helping organise a meeting, for example, may create relationships different from those formed by quietly observing a chat.
Participation can vary across settings and stages. Early attentive reading may help a researcher learn expressions and interactional patterns. Later conversations can explore their meaning. The research role should remain consistent with the ethical arrangements for the field.
Understand how your position matters
A local journalist, teacher, long-term member, or unfamiliar visitor may be addressed differently. A researcher’s institutional affiliation or fluency in a group’s language can shape trust, access, and the accounts offered. Record these consequences as part of the fieldwork.
Familiarity can deepen understanding while introducing new assumptions. A member may explain a practice differently to a newcomer than to an established participant. Treat these encounters as evidence about relationships and meaning-making.
Revisit the agreement
Membership, platforms, topics, and risks can change. Keep communication open and review access when the activity moves into a new space. Plan how to leave the field, discuss a suitable way of sharing the findings, and avoid creating expectations the study cannot meet.
Make contextual ethical decisions
Ethical digital ethnography considers how people understand the setting, what research participation entails, and how collection or publication could affect them. These decisions continue through entry, fieldwork, analysis, and representation.
The Association of Internet Researchers’ guidelines provide a starting point for contextual judgement. Use relevant institutional procedures and explain how the research design addresses the actual field and its relationships.
Examine expectations in each setting
A public page, a membership group, and a private conversation create different expectations. Consider audience, topic, vulnerability, identifiability, and the practical consequences of moving material into a research report. Review these conditions before deciding how to collect or use an exchange. Zimmer’s analysis develops the ethical questions raised by public social data.
Make consent meaningful
For interviews, private interactions, and active research relationships, explain what will happen, what may be recorded, and how material may appear in the report. Offer a practical way to ask questions or decline. Clarify what withdrawal can change at different stages.
Group membership changes over time. Consider how newcomers will learn about the study and how consent will be revisited when an observation becomes a quotation, screenshot, or recorded interview. A message can also contain another person’s words or identifying details.
Think through identification and attribution
Exact quotations can be searchable. Images may reveal faces, handles, timestamps, locations, or distinctive interface details. Discuss attribution where participants seek recognition, and examine protection where identification could expose them or others.
Possible responses include selecting a less identifying extract, paraphrasing accurately, describing an interaction, or using a clearly disclosed composite where methodologically appropriate. Explain consequential alterations and their implications for the analysis. Keep the representation faithful to the evidence. Markham’s discussion examines these representational questions in internet research.
Plan proportionate handling
Collect material needed for the question, separate identifying information from analytical records where appropriate, and use suitable protected storage. Define access, retention, deletion, and any sharing arrangements. Review proposed uploads to transcription, analysis, or AI services before transferring confidential material.
Ethical reflection can also change the report’s level of detail. A vivid scene may be analytically useful while making a small group recognisable. Explain how you balanced contextual understanding, participant preferences, and potential consequences.
Build a connected body of material
Digital ethnographic material develops through engagement with a field. Existing traces, conversations generated through research, and fieldnotes contribute different kinds of evidence about the practice being studied.
The lecture distinguishes archival, elicited, and fieldnote material. Keeping these sources identifiable helps explain how an interpretation was developed and what each source can establish.
On a small screen, swipe the table horizontally.
| Source | What it contributes | Example and recording decision |
|---|---|---|
| Existing or archival traces | Material produced within the field independently of a specific research prompt. | A submitted notice, a discussion thread, or group guidance. Record provenance, time, context, and the basis for retaining it. |
| Elicited material | Accounts or demonstrations generated through research interaction. | An interview about a checking episode or a participant-led explanation of how an update was prepared. Retain the prompt and interactional setting. |
| Fieldnotes | A record of observation, participation, context, emerging questions, and researcher reflection. | Notes on how a newcomer’s evidence was received and how the researcher’s intervention may have shaped the exchange. |
Use observation and conversation together
Observation can show what participants do in the settings you can access. Interviews can explore the meanings they attach to an action, histories that are unavailable in the visible exchange, and disagreements about what occurred. Follow up a particular event when possible.
For example: “When the moderator asked for a current photograph, what made that request appropriate here?” A participant might explain a previous incident, a routine rule, or an expectation that the researcher had misunderstood. Compare that account with the surrounding material.
Choose interview modes thoughtfully
Text interviews allow time to compose a response and can suit asynchronous schedules. Audio or video conversations offer other forms of interaction. Access, privacy, bandwidth, language, accessibility, and participant preference can shape the choice.
Keep the mode in the record. A brief message response, a spoken interview, and a screen-sharing demonstration provide different opportunities for expression. Explain how the interview encounter contributed to the account.
Invite a participant-led demonstration
A member may guide the researcher through an agreed episode, explaining how they moved between a notice, a chat, and a published response. Agree in advance which material can be shown or recorded, and allow the participant to avoid unrelated private information.
Such a conversation reveals a participant’s explanation of practice. It can be compared with observation, while retaining the distinction between an event as observed and its later reconstruction.
Source ID and type: ______
Event time and observation/retrieval time: ______
Platform, setting, and access route: ______
Relevant interaction and surrounding context: ______
Researcher role or prompt: ______
Permission, handling, and publication decision: ______
Related notes, interviews, and memos: ______
Observe routines, episodes, and change
Sustained engagement helps a researcher distinguish a routine from an exception. Attend to when activity occurs, who appears, how responses develop, and how practices change across occasions.
Plan an observation rhythm
Begin with a provisional schedule and revise it as the field becomes clearer. In the fictional group, weekday evenings might reveal checking after work, while weekend sessions might show different volunteers or types of notices. A scheduled meeting may disclose work that public posts leave unseen.
Record observation periods, gaps, and reasons for changing the schedule. Duration should follow the question, access, variation, and depth of engagement. Explain what the period allowed you to learn and which cycles or events remained outside it.
Combine synchronous and asynchronous attention
A live discussion lets you experience uncertainty, waiting, interruption, and the unfolding of a decision. An asynchronous thread may develop over hours or days. Return to it to examine later replies, edits, or changes in interpretation.
The lecture stresses attending to exchanges as they unfold. This can reveal meanings that a final thread conceals. Archival material can also illuminate histories and earlier routines. Identify whether a claim comes from contemporaneous observation, later retrieval, or a participant’s recollection.
Sample for depth and variation
- Follow a complete episode: From a submitted item to a checking decision and any later correction.
- Compare occasions: A routine notice, a disputed contribution, and an update that requires revision.
- Compare positions: Newer members, moderators, established volunteers, and less visible participants who agree to contribute.
- Seek an exception: An occasion when a familiar procedure is altered or bypassed.
These choices support an analytical account of the practice. Keep track of why episodes were selected and how other available material was treated.
Record the conditions of visibility
Your account, membership role, device, access route, and the way a page or thread is ordered can affect what you encounter. Record relevant conditions rather than treating your screen as a complete view of everyone’s activity.
Write useful fieldnotes
Fieldnotes connect events with the circumstances of observing and participating. They preserve detail, distinguish evidence from interpretation, and carry questions into the next encounter.
Write brief notes during an agreed observation where feasible, then expand them soon afterwards. Include the sequence, setting, source references, your own actions, and what remains uncertain. Use a consistent way to distinguish description, interpretation, and reflection.
Setting and access: Public page and private coordination chat included in the agreed research field. Members know the researcher’s role. Names below are teaching pseudonyms.
- 18:12: A reader submits a photograph of a bus-stop relocation notice. Its date is unclear in the image.
- 18:16: Moderator P02 asks in the coordination chat whether anyone has seen the notice today.
- 18:21: New volunteer P01 supplies a wider photograph showing the notice at the stop and explains when it was taken.
- 18:25: I thank P01 for clarifying the timing.
- 18:28: P02 prepares a public update that states when the information was checked.
A request for current confirmation is followed by a photograph, an explanation, and a timed qualification in the update.
Making a claim accountable to a place and time may help a newcomer’s contribution gain acceptance.
My thanks may have reinforced the value of supplying visible confirmation. My journalistic background draws attention to verification.
Compare other accepted contributions. Ask how members judge an account when no photograph is supplied.
Preserve what an archive leaves out
A saved post may retain the wording while losing the researcher’s route to it, the pause before a response, or the conversation through which its meaning became clear. Fieldnotes connect those circumstances with the retained material.
Record uncertainty precisely
Write “I did not observe a reply during this session” when that describes the evidence. Record whether a later message, a private exchange, or a missing observation period could change the interpretation. Return to these questions as access and understanding develop.
Keep the analytical trail usable
Link FN07 with the relevant trace records, interview notes, and later memos. Retain version information when revising the interpretation. A source index should help you return to context while keeping unnecessary identifying details out of analytical copies.
Examine platforms, multimodality, and visibility
Digital practices take shape through technical features, governance, material conditions, and participants’ own uses. Examine how these relationships organise what people can do and what the researcher can observe.
Study practical possibilities and constraints
A group may use a reaction, a pinned explanation, a reply chain, or a moderator label to organise attention and authority. Investigate how members use and understand the feature in this setting. Its cultural significance develops through practice.
Record features as encountered during the study, including relevant interface changes and access roles. Platform documentation can help explain stated rules or intended use; observation and conversation show how people work with those arrangements.
Read images, sound, and text together
In FN07, a wider photograph does more than repeat the original notice. It supplies a visible setting that the accompanying explanation connects with a time. The moderator’s wording then translates that contribution into a public statement with a qualification.
For audio, video, or livestreams, note relevant timing, sound, gesture, captions, editing, and interaction. Link descriptions with source locations or timecodes. Explain how each mode contributes to the practice being analysed.
Use walkthroughs for a defined purpose
A researcher-led app walkthrough can examine an app’s expected uses, interface, operating model, and governance. Light, Burgess, and Duguay provide a method for this work. A participant-led walkthrough instead invites an explanation of the person’s own route through an activity. Specify which you used and how it contributes to the ethnography.
Interpret your platform view
A ranked or personalised display can make some contributions easier to encounter. Describe the conditions of the material you saw and seek other views when relevant. Claims about an underlying ranking system need evidence beyond a single observed ordering.
A username or avatar can be an important social identity within a field. An account may also be shared or have a role that remains uncertain. Investigate the identities and relationships relevant to the question without assuming that a legal name or demographic profile is necessary.
Develop an interpretation
Digital ethnographic analysis develops through repeated movement between field encounters, source material, emerging concepts, and further engagement. The goal is an account that explains a practice through its meanings and relationships.
Begin analysis during fieldwork
Ask what is becoming familiar, what remains puzzling, and which observation would help examine a possible explanation. Reading and coding can organise material while fieldwork continues. Memos connect the details with analytical questions.
- Locate the evidenceRevisit the episode, its setting, and the researcher’s role.
- Develop provisional codesMark relevant actions, meanings, distinctions, and relationships.
- Compare occasions and accountsExamine recurrence, variation, and competing explanations.
- Refine an interpretationState what the evidence supports and return to the field with sharper questions.
Follow a claim through its evidence
Initial codes for FN07 might include “requesting current confirmation”, “making local presence visible”, “newcomer contribution accepted”, and “qualifying the public update”. These labels help retrieve material. The interpretation must explain their relationship.
Moderator P02 explains: “The picture helps us know what someone has checked. With people who have helped for years, we sometimes know how they checked without asking again.”
This account suggests that visible confirmation and a history of contribution may work together. Compare it with observed decisions before developing a broader claim.
Seek a case that complicates the first account
Suppose a later observation, FN12, records a long-term volunteer’s brief report being accepted without a photograph. That episode changes the question from “Are images always required?” towards “How does remembered reliability affect what evidence is requested?”
In the practice material, credible local witnessing is assembled through both visible checking and recognised contribution. The newcomer in FN07 makes the timing and setting of a claim available for inspection. FN12 and the moderator’s account suggest that an established history can sometimes support a shorter demonstration. Authority therefore appears to develop through relationships as well as through the evidence attached to an individual message.
A competing explanation might concern urgency, topic, or who was moderating. Examine those conditions across further episodes. Keep interpretations proportionate to the material and retain differences that matter.
Use theory to deepen the account
Concepts such as boundary work, authority, trust, participation, or infrastructure may help develop the analysis. Explain what the concept makes clearer and how it fits the evidence. If adopting grounded theory, follow its particular methodological commitments and name that choice explicitly.
Write and evaluate the account
An ethnographic account connects a recognisable social world with an analytical contribution. Readers should understand the practice, see the evidence behind the interpretation, and assess how the researcher’s access and position shaped the account.
Build a scene into an argument
Introduce the setting and episode, show the details relevant to the question, and explain their significance. A thick description connects an action with the meanings and relationships through which it becomes intelligible.
The group’s checking practice gives local witnessing an accountable form. In FN07, P02’s request connects a notice with the question of who has seen it recently. P01’s wider photograph and explanation make a particular encounter available for inspection, and the public update preserves a qualification about timing. This sequence allows a newcomer to contribute recognised evidence. Yet FN12 complicates an image-centred account: a familiar volunteer’s message is accepted with less visible demonstration. Read alongside IN03, the episodes suggest that members assess both the submitted evidence and a remembered history of contribution. The interpretation concerns how credibility is assembled in these episodes and requires further comparison before describing a stable group-wide rule.
Explain how the account was made
We studied ______ to understand ______. The field included ______ during ______, with observation organised around ______. Access and participation were negotiated through ______. We connected ______ traces, ______ conversations, and fieldnotes. Analysis developed through ______, with comparisons of ______. Our position as ______ shaped ______. Ethical and representational decisions included ______. The resulting claims address ______ within the scope of ______.
Describe changes in field boundaries, significant gaps, and how participation developed. Explain transcription, translation, and treatment of visual or audio material. Identify whether a reported scene is a direct observation, an account elicited later, a paraphrase, or a disclosed composite.
Use reflexivity to examine an interpretation
The researcher in FN07 may find visible verification especially persuasive because of a journalistic background. A reflexive memo should trace that expectation into the analysis: did it privilege photographs, overlook remembered relationships, or shape the questions asked?
Another researcher might attend first to the moderation role or to who had time to visit the stop. Explain which alternatives you considered and how engagement with the material changed the interpretation.
Assess quality through the research task
- Coherence: Do the question, field, methods, concepts, and claims fit together?
- Engagement: Is there enough depth and recurrence to explain the practice being discussed?
- Context: Are platform conditions and relevant everyday relationships made visible?
- Evidence: Can readers follow the connection among episodes, participant accounts, fieldnotes, and interpretation?
- Variation: Are exceptions, alternative readings, and differences in position examined?
- Reflexivity: Are consequential effects of access, participation, and researcher assumptions addressed?
- Care in representation: Does publication respect the agreed treatment of people, groups, and their contributions?
Explain what comparison can support
Detailed fieldwork can develop concepts, illuminate processes, and suggest questions relevant to comparable settings. Show why the proposed relevance follows and which contextual conditions matter. Participant feedback can clarify a scene or contribute another interpretation; explain how you used it.
End the field relationship thoughtfully. Discuss what findings can be shared, in what form, and with whom. A useful account may help participants reflect on a practice while contributing to a wider scholarly conversation.
Learn with the lecture and fieldwork workshop
Use the lecture to revisit field entry, sources of material, fieldnotes, and analysis. Keep the fictional episode beside you and connect each methodological point with a research decision.
Open the lecture on YouTube. The approximate starting points below follow the supplied transcript. The chapter develops its fieldwork guidance with a connected example and further readings.
Attempt each task before opening the response
Activity 1 · Decide where the field should go next
Prompt: A volunteer mentions an unrelated private group where some checking occurs. Should that group enter the study?
Suggested response: First examine its relevance to the research question. If it could illuminate the practice, review the access, participation, and ethical arrangements needed before including it. Record the decision and its effect on the field’s boundaries.
Activity 2 · Examine a quotation decision
Prompt: A public comment is particularly useful, but its wording could identify a member through a search. How would you decide what to publish?
Suggested response: Consider the context, expected audience, sensitivity, participant preferences, and basis for research use. Evaluate whether consent, a different extract, an accurate paraphrase, or another form of description would support the analysis appropriately. Record any consequential representational choice.
Activity 3 · Separate evidence and interpretation
Prompt: Is “the group trusted P01” a sufficient observation note for FN07?
Suggested response: Record the visible sequence first: the request, photograph, explanation, researcher response, and published qualification. Acceptance or trust is an interpretation to examine through this sequence, other episodes, and participants’ accounts.
Activity 4 · Use the exception
Prompt: FN12 records acceptance without a photograph. What happens to the claim that a photograph is required for credibility?
Suggested response: The claim needs revision. Compare membership history, topic, urgency, moderation, and the available explanation. A more useful question asks how visible evidence and recognised contribution interact in decisions about credibility.
Your independent digital ethnography workshop
Use the fictional case for a planning and analysis exercise. Before undertaking real fieldwork, establish the research design and appropriate access and ethical arrangements.
- Write one question about a social practice.
- Draw an initial field map, including relevant connections between media and everyday settings.
- State a boundary rule and identify what will remain outside the field.
- Prepare an entry explanation and describe the research role.
- Write an ethical decision memo for one form of material.
- Plan an observation rhythm and explain the variation it could reveal.
- Draft a source record and a four-layer fieldnote.
- Develop provisional codes and compare an episode with an exception.
- Write 600–800 words linking contextual detail with an interpretation.
- Explain one reflexive revision, one access limit, and a plan for leaving the field.
Completion check: A reader can understand the practice, follow the evidence behind your interpretation, and assess how participation and access shaped the account.
Glossary and further reading
These concepts help describe the field and the research process precisely. The readings develop digital practices, connective fieldwork, netnography, platform analysis, and ethical representation.
- Digital ethnography
- Ethnographic inquiry into digitally mediated practices and their relationships with wider social life.
- Fieldsite
- A setting or configuration of relationships and activities included in the research field.
- Connective ethnography
- An approach that follows relevant relationships across media, settings, and activities.
- Netnography
- A methodological tradition associated with Kozinets for ethnographic study of online cultures and socialities.
- Cultural entry
- Developing access, relationships, competence, and an understood research role within a setting.
- Participant observation
- Learning through involvement in, and attentive observation of, social practices.
- Quiet observation
- Reading or observing without active contribution; the researcher’s role and disclosure arrangements still need explanation.
- Digital trace
- Recorded material associated with digital activity, encountered under particular technical and social conditions.
- Elicited material
- Accounts or demonstrations generated through a research prompt or interaction.
- Fieldnote
- A contextual record of observation, participation, interpretation, reflection, and emerging questions.
- Affordance
- A possibility for action arising through the relationship between people and an environment or technology.
- Co-presence
- Ways of experiencing or sustaining others’ presence within an interactional setting.
- Synchronous interaction
- Interaction occurring through participants’ engagement at roughly the same time.
- Asynchronous interaction
- Interaction whose contributions may be separated in time.
- Thick description
- Contextual description that connects actions with their cultural meanings and relationships.
- Reflexivity
- Examination of how the researcher’s position, relationships, actions, and assumptions shape the inquiry.
- Positionality
- The researcher’s socially situated relationship to the field and to the knowledge being produced.
Sources and guided reading
- Dr. USP. (2021). How to do digital ethnography: USP lectures [Video]. YouTube.The accompanying lecture introduces digital and connective approaches, cultural entry, sources of material, fieldnotes, participation, analysis, and quality.
- Pink, S., Horst, H., Postill, J., Hjorth, L., Lewis, T., & Tacchi, J. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. SAGE.Develops inquiry through experiences, practices, things, relationships, social worlds, localities, and events.
- Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the internet: Embedded, embodied and everyday. Bloomsbury Academic.Explores how internet practices are situated within everyday life and how an ethnographic field can follow relevant connections.
- Kozinets, R. V. (2020). Netnography: The essential guide to qualitative social media research (3rd ed.). SAGE.An extended methodological guide to investigating, interacting, immersing, analysing, interpreting, and communicating netnographic research.
- Boellstorff, T., Nardi, B., Pearce, C., & Taylor, T. L. (2024). Ethnography and virtual worlds: A handbook of method (Updated ed.). Princeton University Press.A guide to research design, participant observation, interviews, ethics, analysis, and writing in virtual-world research.
- Postill, J., & Pink, S. (2012). Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web. Media International Australia, 145(1), 123–134. Author manuscript (PDF).Examines routine, movement, and sociality in the making of ethnographic knowledge and places.
- franzke, a. s., Bechmann, A., Zimmer, M., Ess, C., & the Association of Internet Researchers. (2020). Internet research: Ethical guidelines 3.0. Association of Internet Researchers. See also the AoIR ethics resources.Context-sensitive guidance for ethical judgement across the research process, including collection, consent, analysis, and dissemination.
- Zimmer, M. (2010). “But the data is already public”: On the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics and Information Technology, 12, 313–325.Examines ethical questions raised by research use of publicly accessible social information.
- Markham, A. (2012). Fabrication as ethical practice: Qualitative inquiry in ambiguous internet contexts. Information, Communication & Society, 15(3), 334–353.Develops a methodological discussion of representation and protection in internet research. Explain any representational transformation and its relationship to the evidence.
- Light, B., Burgess, J., & Duguay, S. (2018). The walkthrough method: An approach to the study of apps. New Media & Society, 20(3), 881–900. Author repository record.A complementary method for examining an app’s expected use, interface, operating model, and governance.
Follow one practice through a change of setting
Return to your field map and choose a moment when an activity moves from a public exchange into another setting. Identify what changes in audience, evidence, and participation. Use Ethnography to deepen the account of cultural understanding, or compare the question with Content Analysis if your next task concerns the distribution of categories across a defined set of messages.