Digital Ethnography: More a mindset than a tool
Channel: annette markham
Date: 2021-01-28

In this talk Professor Annette Markham (Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre in Melbourne Australia) stresses the importance of the explorative and experimental mindset for making a successful transition from face-to-face to digital modes for doing research in this COVID-19 era. An extended version of a talk given virtually on January 26, 2021 for researchers and students in Germany (this version is modified from an earlier watermarked Camtasia version). This is a Minor content errors are natural in extemporaneous talk. See recommended resources below for more clarity and details.

Table of Contents for Video

0:00 Introduction
03:16 Part 1: Characteristics of Digital Contexts (brief history)
04:01 Four "waves" of research of digital research
08:34 Venn diagram map of research trends
10:56 Part 2: Techniques for studying digital phenomena
11:11 Methods as choices at critical junctures
13:54 Being flexibly adaptive is the key
14:02 Salient characteristics of digital media use that influence research
14:18 Many contexts overlap and many affordances are invisible
16:28 Physical presence is not the same as social presence 
17:13 Time is a malleable construct
18:16 Field boundaries are constructed; more ad hoc and temporal than geographic
19:34 Difficult to identify the unit of analysis
20:08 Being immersed helps you identify invisible and tacit routines
20:50 Data analytics only focus on presence, traces, what is already visible
21:23 Participants may not be aware of the multiple agents that influences them
23:15 Studying flows versus objects
23:30 Pursuing a "wholistic" explanation is not only elusive, but likely yields less accuracy 
23:56 Example of studying the aftermath of Japanese Earthquakes in 2011
29:11 Major questions about how to do fieldwork online
30:47 These questions emerge because our methods are born in traditional anthropology
32:28 Reconstructing fieldwork from the ground up to get better fit between field methods and digital contexts  
34:54 "Follow the...." (multi-sited / multi-sighted approaches)
35:52 "Moving through Digital Flows" --a framework for practice
39:36 Back to the Japan Earthquake example to illustrate my effort to "follow" and "go with the flow"
43:15 My favorite spiral image as inspiration to characterize what researchers do
44:02 Reminder of Clifford Geertz's metaphor of culture as "webs of significance"
44:43 Be a flexibly adaptive detective like Sherlock Holmes
45:51 Concluding recommendation to deconstruct and reconstruct fieldwork techniques for creative adaptation
48:25 Concluding recommendation to be unafraid to rethink research questions to better fit online contexts

More detailed argument development here:
Markham, A. (2013). Fieldwork in social media: What would Malinowski do?  Journal of Qualitative Communication Research, 2(4) 434-446. DOI: 10.1525/qcr.2013.2.4.434. Reprint version available here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/271801945_Fieldwork_in_Social_Media

Markham, A. (2020, December 8). Doing digital ethnography in the digital age. SocArXiv Papers https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/hqm4g 

Markham, A. N. (2017). Ethnography in the digital era: From fields to flow, descriptions to interventions. In Denzin, N., & Lincoln, Y. (Eds.). The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, 5th Edition (650-668). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Preprint version available for download on academia.edu https://www.academia.edu/20828448/Ethnography_in_the_Digital_Internet_Era_final_draft_jan_20_2016_published_2017_ 

Markham, A., & Gammelby, A. K. (2017). Moving through digital flows: An epistemological and practical approach. In Flick, U. (Ed.). Handbook of Qualitative Data Collection (451-465). London: Sage. Personal reprint copy available here https://www.dropbox.com/s/y4rth3ghsjgvw79/markham_gammelby_moving_through_digital_flows_reprint.pdf?dl=0