[Air-L] Help with digital ethnography & early Internet history

[Shannan Palma]

Hi Lexi,
Great project! I'm currently working on a three-article narrative genealogy
of incel rhetoric. Re: #2, I don't do digital ethnography, but I do think a
lot about safety while researching online misogyny.

Unfortunately, pre-emptive safety work is often a necessary part of
conceptualizing this kind of project. You could make all or most of your
social media private, change your handles to make your personal accounts
more difficult to find, take down any public photos/images of yourself that
you can, set up a separate twitter handle just for the project, and use a
dedicated email address, google voice phone number and departmental address
when setting up the web domain (also add privacy for the domain). That
tends to be enough for my colleagues who research kink and may be enough as
you're just getting started. The reality is that if someone wants to find
your information, they will, and harassment/trolling of female researchers
using online methods is as common as it is disturbing. You can't know for
sure if or when it will happen, and staying on guard is exhausting and
doesn't do anything to protect you, so I suggest putting some simple
precautions in place to make it more difficult to find your personal info
and then not worrying about it until/unless it happens.

If it does happen, one powerful way I've seen targeted researchers flip the
script on feeling powerless/victimized has been to turn the harassment
itself into a subject of analysis. If you haven't already, look up F.
Vera-Gray's article in Feminist Review 115 and Emma Jane's work on e-bile.

Please feel free to reach out privately if you'd like to discuss. I look
forward to learning more about your research as you move forward with the
project!

Dr. Shannan Palma
Faculty Director, Writing and Digital Communication
Assistant Professor, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Agnes Scott College
https://shannanpalma.com


On Fri, Feb 7, 2020 at 10:41 AM Alexis De Coning <
Alexis.DeConing at colorado.edu> wrote:

> Hi AIR folks,
>
> Long-time follower, first-time emailer! I'm a PhD candidate in Media
> Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. I study the men's rights
> movement, using interviews, ethnography, archival research, and textual
> analysis. I'm currently looking at both pre-digital and digital materials,
> and trying to unpack how the movement "came online" around the 1990s. I'm
> reaching out to elicit some advice, recommendations, and help with a few
> challenges I'm encountering:
>
> 1. Can anyone recommend good sources on early Internet history,
> particularly with regards to gender? I'm especially interested in how and
> when "regular" people started to adopt Internet technologies. I've found
> some interesting evidence in print materials from the early 1990s that show
> men's rights activists transitioning to online spaces, but I'd like to
> historicize and contextualize what I'm seeing.
>
> 2. I'd like to start doing some "digital ethnography" via Twitter. My
> university's IRB liaison suggested I build a simple webpage where I can
> explain my research, have my consent form, etc. and link to it in my
> Twitter profile/tweets to meet IRB's standards for consent with human
> subjects. However, given the population I study, I'm concerned about
> personal safety, doxxing, harassment, etc. I don't want to be paranoid, but
> I also don't want to be naive about putting my personal information into
> the digital sphere via an easily-hackable webpage. Any advice or
> recommendations on digital security or how to go about digital ethnography
> with "difficult" populations be most appreciated.
>
> Thanks and best regards,
> Lexi de Coning
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