[Air-L] virtual ethnography

[Dan Perkel]

Hi all,
Thanks, all, for a great discussion so far. I don't want to pull the
discussion too far away from the latest exchange if people want to
continue. But, I had a follow up question to the lists that people
have been sending out. I've read many of these, though not all by any
stretch. Has anyone read any good writing on the practicalities of
doing online participant observation specifically with respect to the
writing of fieldnotes following sessions?

I have this very crude division in my mind between (A) doing online
participant observation in a virtual world (if virtual world is
perhaps poorly defined as an avatar based environment dominated by
synchronous interaction) vs. (B) online participant observation of a
dynamic website (feel free to replace "website" with favorite term:
social network site? blogs? forums? online community that is somehow
not a virtual world? the online part of a networked public?).

I'm trying to write a paper on what it means to write a fieldnote with
respect to the latter, but have no desire to re-invent the wheel.
Having done offline participant observation and read a few of the
accounts of (A), what writing fieldnotes is and what would go into a
fieldnote seem quite analagous. I cannot say this about my experience
trying write fieldnotes following P.O. of the other kind (B).

I think it possible that I am also guilty of trying to graft a certain
set of ways doing the research onto something kind of different and
not seeing a non-grafty approach.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be much appreciated!

And, to add to the list generated above, I have found the following
articles very useful as well:
Anne Beaulieu, "Mediating  ethnography: objectivity  and the makings
of ethnographies on the internet," Social Epistemology 18 (2004):
139-164.

Burrell, Jenna. Forthcoming. The Fieldsite as Heterogeneous Network.
Field Methods.

Leander, Kevin M. and Kelly M. McKim, "Tracing the Everyday 'Sitings'
of Adolescents on the Internet: a strategic adaptation of ethnography
across online and offline spaces," Education, Communication &
Information 3, no. 2 (2003): 211-240.

Star, Susan Leigh. 1999. The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American
Behavioral Scientist 43, no. 3: 377.

Regards,
Dan
--------------------------------------------
Dan Perkel
PhD Candidate
School of Information and Berkeley Center for New Media
UC Berkeley
dperkel at ischool.berkeley.edu

On Mon, Feb 2, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Rhiannon Bury <rcbury at rogers.com> wrote:
>
> Laetitia
>
> I certainly don't mean to be elitist, just accurate. :)
> There's nothing inherently wrong with "illustrative snippets": they are
> the norm in the presentation of much sociological research, especially
> when the sample is larger and some quantitative data is also presented.
>
> Ethnography is not "alternative" and non-normative by
> definition. In recent years, it has become aligned with a larger
> "post-positivist" approach to qualitative research in which the
> researcher is meant to interrogate their role in the production of
> knowledge. In my opinion, one should not be conducting virtual research
> to escape methodological rigor and informing theoretical frameworks.  I
> am  not saying that only cultural anthropologists should be conducting
> virtual research (that would count me out!) or that researchers
> previously unfamiliar with qualitative methods should not try their
> hand at it in the "virtual field." But before doing so, they need to
> familiar themselves with methodology and terminology
>
>
>
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