Producing Comparable Data through Systematic Observation

It’s 7:45 am. The morning briefing is about to start as you shove in the last bites of breakfast. One from the team is looking for the right cable to connect a laptop to the television screen. In a moment, the screen will display slides of today’s observation guide. Last-minute instructions are hurled out in the room as the clock strikes 8:30, and it’s time to go. Short of breath from hurrying to your designated event tent, you place yourself strategically, mobile phone in hand and ready to intensively observe and note down. With one eye on the clock and another on the audience, you note down anything of relevance in front of you. You alternate between counting the phone-scrollers, stage-watchers, and conversationalists every 15th minute and jotting down observations in the Ethno-platform. Overwhelmed by the many impressions, you wonder if you are following the detailed instructions like you’re supposed to. But exactly what measures are necessary to align our data collection for our purpose and make our observations comparable between researchers?

Picture 3. Morning briefing

Each morning, we held a briefing to make sure all ethnographers were in on the observation guide of the day (Picture 4). This was to ensure that everyone entered the event tents with the same analytical filter. When you venture into the craft of ethnography, you quickly realize that a million things happen at the same time. You cannot note everything down and all field observations are in principle an exclusion of other events you could have documented. By explicating exactly what we had to observe, we hoped to install a collective lens, which would capture the same type of attention-related behavior across researchers. The guides also served as a helpful tool to keep each of us on track of what to take notice of.

Picture 4. Example of observation guide

Quantified Attention-related Behavior

We figured that one way of streamlining our fieldnotes would be by counting attention-related behavior among the audience at different events. This idea of explicitly counting occurrences in the field is not very common in social anthropology where there seems to be a reluctancy to “mathematize” the discipline. However, some scholars hold that anthropologists do in fact count all the time in the sense that they register recurrences in the field to detect prevalent dynamics and themes. However, they rarely state the exact number of times a particular event happens. For our data collection at The People’s Meeting, we decided to deviate from traditional modes of doing fieldwork by explicitly quantifying ethnographic observations. This was done by developing what we call attention schemes and seating charts for the different event stages. The attention schemes and seating charts were distributed to each ethnographer alongside the observation guides at the morning briefing. Examples of these are shown in Picture 5 below.

Picture 5. Example of filled out observation scheme and seating chart

With the seating chart (Picture 5, right), we could spatially map where the audience were sitting at each event. In the example above, the ethnographer marked people present at the time that the event started with a black dot, and people arriving later with a ring. The attention schemes (Picture 5, left) were used to map attention behavior during the events. With the event tent divided into four sections (front-right, front-left, back-right, back-left), we noted if none (I), few (F), half (H), many (M), or everyone (A) were looking at the stage, at their phones, or talking to each other. We registered this in the attention schemes every 15 minutes.

Ensuring Comparability

Aside from the schemes and charts, we observed what took place in front of us in between the 15-minute intervals and wrote descriptive fieldnotes in the Ethno-platform. These tasks demanded our undivided attention if we were to uphold rigor in our data collection. Indeed, we find that this combination of observation guides, schemes, and the common format for fieldnotes provided by the Ethno-platform provided us with data that work well in combination. What we got was detailed records of how a given event progressed and different measures of the audience’s attention. And since we repeated the same procedure at each observed event, we can align and compare the data and hereby confirm or dismiss different tendencies we’ve observed across events and ethnographers throughout the festival site.

During the People’s Meeting we ended up collecting a ton of fieldnotes, seating charts, and attention schemes, and when we returned to the university it was time to reach our final goal of this project, namely, to process and analyze the data computationally – but more on that in the following blogpost.

DISTRACT

The authors if this blogpost series are Sofie Læbo Astrupgaard — PhD fellow in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen, Clara Rosa Sandbye — PhD fellow at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, and Emilie Gregersen — MSc student in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. The trio has been working as a part of the interdisciplinary research project DISTRACT, studying the dynamics of issue attention at a political festival.

Source

Compiling Ethnographic Data in an Ethno-platform 

The sun disappears behind the colorful town houses as you enter a pub in the narrow, cobbled road to test the pilot version of the Ethno-platform, an online fieldnote tool. It’s Wednesday, and tomorrow the town will buzz with people debating, networking, and navigating between each other around the festival area. You enter the pub and look for a table where you can sit discreetly, but still have a good overview of everyone in the pub. A group of friends immediately catches your attention. You begin to scribble: “20:58. They turn their chairs and move closer to a big TV screen beside their table. A UEFA match is about to start.” Just before, they were chatting eagerly with each other and now their common attention is oriented towards the TV. An analytical thought pops into your head, but you are unsure how to note it down in the platform. You wonder if it would be best to type it into the Ethno-platform next to the descriptive observation, or in a separate text field. Soon you return to the research team and discuss your experiences. How do we compile fieldnotes in a common format between researchers?

In our training as traditional (social) anthropologists, we’ve been told once and again that ethnographic work is a lonesome discipline conducted by a single ethnographer in the field. In the context of studying a comprehensive event like The People’s Meeting, however, the lonesome ethnographer might fall short. Since the festival only lasts for four days once every year, there was a great asset in mobilizing more ethnographers to cover more ground. We are sure that one trained ethnographer could collect rich data during the four days, but what if we could register what happens at every corner of the festival area at the same time?

The question remained, how we should go about this? Before us, sociologists and anthropologists at UCPH have experimented with what they call “short, big-scale fieldwork”. In the Utopia project, they asked themselves what kind of knowledge can be obtained if – instead of having one person conducting fieldwork in 100 days – 100 people conducted fieldwork in one day. Inspired by this idea, we asked ourselves how much data our team of ten scholars, of which seven were anthropologically trained, could collect in four days. In other words, we wanted to collect as many observations of micro-interactions at The People’s Meeting as possible. But clearly, this sort of collaborative data collection would require some coordination.

A Common Tool

A core task for the ethnographer is writing fieldnotes. This is often a messy and time-consuming process that entails jotting down in-situ notes in a notebook and elaborating on them later. The result is often unstructured and not easily comprehensible for anyone besides the author. We needed a way of streamlining our data collection to avoid a messy pool of observations without the time and resources to make sense of them. And after numerous considerations, this was how the first contours of the Ethno-platform emerged. So, what exactly is the Ethno-platform? The basic idea was to create a semi-fixed template for writing fieldnotes which would ease this sort of collaborative data collection[1]. Here, the ethnographers should be able to fill in their observations in pre-defined text fields on their device at hand such as a mobile phone or a tablet.

Picture 1. Ethno-platform interface on a mobile phone

Let us quickly guide you through the platform interface: When accessing the Ethno-platform on your phone, you meet the interface in Picture 1. The first thing you do is to select yourself as the authoring ethnographer from a list of team members on the project. Then you type in metadata such as date, location, and situation which is stored with the content of the fieldnote. In the “situation” field, you type in the necessary contextual information for other researchers to understand the observations described in the fieldnote such as “Panel debate on sustainable food industries”. Lastly, there are two open text fields. One, where you write your observations, and another, where you add analytical or methodological reflections to the set of observations or the project in general. In this way, all fieldnotes will have a similar structure while also allowing you to write descriptive notes and reflections from the field. When you click “done”, the notes are stored on a GDPR-compliant[2] server where they can be accessed and edited at any given point by all members of your team.

One of the main goals for the Ethno-platform was to make a common data archive where anyone from our project could access any fieldnote created during the week and in principle be able to utilize the data instantly. Here, the metadata from each fieldnote came in handy. Having consistently typed in the information for every fieldnote in the project during the case study, we ensured a simple contextual introduction to each note which helped everyone easily navigate in the fieldnotes through the platform.

A Common Format

Aside from the Ethno-platform aligning our fieldnotes in structure, we also needed to establish some ground rules for how the tool should be used in the field. This was key if we wanted to successfully collect numerous observations of the same type of micro-interactions. To do so, we agreed on three formalities when writing in the platform: Analytical or methodological comments pertaining to an observation would be written in asterisks (* analytical comment *), citations would be written in quotation marks (“citation”), and each observation would be accompanied by a time stamp to indicate exactly when a given action or observation happened allowing us to follow the temporal progression of the fieldnotes (see Picture 2). While the time stamps might seem to only constrain the observer further in the field, they indeed turned out to be valuable to the collaborative element of our project. They allowed us to pin-point tendencies temporally in the fieldnotes and compare them across ethnographers to see if the tendencies were in fact patterns. With the Ethno-platform and these common formalities, we now had a framework for our ethnographic work which would ensure an alignment of our notes.

Picture 2. Example of observation in the Ethno-platform

Having these three formalities ensured consistency in our ethnographic data giving us the opportunity to compile fieldnotes i.e., patch together all observations collectively. Of course, the content of each fieldnote is still characterized to some extent by the authoring ethnographer as we have different views and take notice of different things in the field. However, with a firm infrastructural framework in our hands, we establish a common ground for how to note down our observations, and thereby, we have a general format for compiling and storing fieldnotes across a big team of ethnographers. Now that we have established the common structure, in the next installment we will move on to how we ensured that our fieldnotes not only align in format but also in content.

Notes

[1] At SODAS, we are currently in the process of developing our own web-based application with similar, but more user-friendly features. However, for the pilot version in 2021, the software was provided by Survey Exact and ran through an internet browser.

[2] General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation to privacy law in the European Union (EU) that protects personal data of EU citizens.

DISTRACT

The authors if this blogpost series are Sofie Læbo Astrupgaard — PhD fellow in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen, Clara Rosa Sandbye — PhD fellow at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University, and Emilie Gregersen — MSc student in Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen. The trio has been working as a part of the interdisciplinary research project DISTRACT, studying the dynamics of issue attention at a political festival.

Source

You already know how to use Roam Research, the new note taking app taking the internet by storm. You don’t need to follow the #roamcult hashtag on Twitter, or watch the dozens of YouTube explainer videos in order to start using Roam. If you’ve used Wikipedia (with its web of interlinked definitions), an outliner (with information organized by indented bullet points), Twitter (where you can find subjects by #hashtags), or any desktop computer (where items can exist in multiple locations via the use of an alias or shortcut), then you are already familiar with the main building blocks of Roam. What makes Roam “new” isn’t these tools, but how they have been put together. In short, Roam is much more than the sum of its parts.

Before I go any further, I need to issue a few caveats. The day I posted this, Roam temporarily stopped taking new users. Then the next day they announced that they will start charging, and it won’t be cheap. And even if the waitlist and fee doesn’t put you off, it is important to remember that Roam is still a beta app, so don’t want to trust your life’s work to it.¹ But this post isn’t meant to be a how-to,² or a review, or even an encouragement to use Roam. Instead I want to talk about what makes Roam special. I think Roam offers a new paradigm for how we take notes, one that other apps will surely strive to copy.

So what is it like to use Roam? At its heart Roam is basically an outliner. When you open a new blank document you are presented with a bullet point. You can add new bullets below it, or nest them inside each other, just like any other outliner. If you’ve used Workflowy or Dynalist Roam will feel vary familiar.

Like those apps you can also add tags to each item. This means that it can do many of the same tricks I wrote about in my post from two years ago about how to Roll Your Own QDA (Qualitative Data Analysis) software. Roam lacks some of the niceties of these more polished outlining apps, but it more makes up for that with its own special sauce: “Linked References.”

Linked References appears as a section at the bottom of every page and shows you a list of all the documents that link back to the current page. This is the main magic which makes Roam so revolutionary. Imagine you have a note for a contact named “John Smith” and you also have half a dozen notes about meetings where John Smith was present. If you remembered to link his name each time you typed it (Roam makes it easy to turn anything you’ve typed into links), all those meeting notes will appear as a neat little list in your Linked References section. And even if you forgot to turn John Smith’s name into links, Roam will still catch it in a section called, unsurprisingly, “Unlinked References.” (And there is an option to turn those into real links if you like.)

A lot of apps allow you to add tags to notes as you write. (One of my favorites is called Bear.) In any of these apps, if you click on a tag you will see a list of all the notes with that tag. So what is different about how Roam does this? First, when you click on a tag in an app like Bear, you are taken out of the document you are working on to a list of files. This interrupts your workflow. Roam includes Linked References right in the document. (Because “Linked References” is a bit of a mouthful, I will just call them “backlinks” from now on.) Second, Bear tags work at the document level, but because Roam is an outliner, it can show you the exact paragraph that contained the relevant tag. (See the example image above where all the mentions of John Smith are highlighted from the notes about meetings in which he attended.) Third, the backlinks show up in the document as editable text, so you can work on them right there without having to open up the original document! Forth, you can filter and search your list of backlinks, quickly narrowing the list down to the most relevant results. And finally, tags in Roam are not just search terms, they are actually pages which you can edit.

To see how this all works, let’s go back to the John Smith example. If every time you have a meeting you add linked tags to everyone present, when you look at the backlinks at the bottom of John Smith’s page you can quickly filter the list by who else was present. For instance, you could narrow the list down to only those meetings where both John Smith and Jane Doe attended the same meeting.

And suppose at one of those meetings John Smith had been assigned a job, you would see the text “John Smith was assigned to write the annual report” right there in your backlinks, you wouldn’t need to go hunting for the initial notes about that meeting to remember what he had agreed to do. You could even edit the text itself to make a new page linked to “annual report” and then start making notes to send to John about what needs to be included in that report. Finally, since the “John Smith” tag is itself a page, you could include his contact information there so you’d have his email address handy when you are ready to send him those notes.

It may not be obvious from this example, but one of the advantages of such a system is that it can also reveal a lot of links you might not have consciously thought of when you were writing. If you still enjoy strolling around library stacks because you love how the Dewey Decimal System doesn’t just show you the book you are looking for but often helps you discover related books you didn’t even know you needed, Roam can off you’re a similar feeling for your own notes. The list of backlinks often reveal adjacent ideas and helps forge new connections in your own writing. There is even a “graph view” that turns these links into a pretty chart which you can explore within the app.

Backlinks might be Roam’s most notable feature, but it has many more tricks up its sleeve. (If anything, the developers seem to be going a bit overboard with all kinds of experimental features when some of the more basic functionality still need work!) I will focus on three of these features here. These are features tied to the core function of the app as a place to take notes. The app is also a database, and there are a lot of features which make use of that to programmatically output information based on queries, but I’ll skip those advanced features here. The features I think make Roam especially useful for taking notes are: transclusion, the sidebar, and Daily Notes:

Transclusion refers to the ability to embed a link from another note (or another part of the same note) directly into an outline. Let’s say I’m taking notes on fruit and have a section titled “apples” under which I list various types of oranges (Granny Smith, Gala, Fuji, etc.) and I include information for each, such as where to buy them, when they are in season, how they taste, etc. When I start another note with a recipe for apple pie, I might want to include my notes on Granny Smith apples in that note, rather than simply linking to the Granny Smith note (as in the John Smith example). Roam allows me to directly embed the relevant bullet points from my “apples” outline right in the document. And if I edit the Granny Smith information in one place, it will be updated everywhere else it appears! The following two pictures show how that might work. In the first picture we have the definition in context in the original note, and in the second picture we see it embedded in ta pie recipe.

The second feature is the sidebar: a sliding window pane that can appear on the right side of the screen. Any note (or section of a note) you are working on can be opened there for reference. I the picture below I have a shopping list note that I can update as I work on the recipe. The sidebar can handle multiple notes at the same time, and they can be collapsed or expanded as needed.

Finally, Daily Notes are a special kind of note that appear each day, with the date at the top. I was a little confused by this at first, but after playing with Roam for a week I found that I absolutely love using this feature. It encourages you to keep a running journal of your day. Rather than adding new notes for each topic you want to write about, you just tag them as you go. Remember, tagging something creates a new page that will automatically have a back-link that includes what you are writing in the daily journal! Because of the magic of backlinks, there is no need to create new documents for everything. That means you can just focus on writing and not worry too much about where things should go. I have found this tremendously liberating, and as a result I find I write a lot more notes than I used to.

In Roam the process of writing and the process of filing are entwined with each other, rather than two separate processes. I think this is what makes Roam such a joy to use, and so far no other app has managed to capture this feeling. Nor am I alone. I think this feeling is what explains the #roamcult hashtag. With other apps you often feel that each new piece of information added to the app makes it harder to find what you are looking for. My Evernote, for instance, often feels like an overstuffed shoebox whose lid no longer closes. But with Roam I feel that the more data I add to the app, the more useful all that data becomes. Maybe it just feels like a shiny new toy because I have only been using it for a few weeks? Only time will tell if this feeling is justified, but so far I think it really works.

As much as I like Roam, I think what I really want is something like Roam but better. I find the app already bloated with too many features, it lacks a good mobile app, and it can sometimes take a long time to load. Fortunately, a lot of other developers have been inspired by Roam to create similar apps, or add Roam-like functionality to existing apps. It is too early to tell if any of these will succeed, but one I am especially hopeful about is Obsidian because it comes from the same team behind Dynalist, and their vision emphasizes open standards and local control of your data. The Archive is another possibility. Inspired by the Zettelkasten Method of Niklas Luhmann, it actually predates the other apps, but I find Luhmann’s system a bit cumbersome to use compared to Roam and Obsidian. Thinktool is more of a traditional outliner, but it includes backlinks and transclusion like Roam. Other efforts can be found in this list of open-source Roam alternatives. And Athens is a more ambitious attempt to create an open source clone of Roam that matches all of its features. It is too early to tell which of these apps will succeed, but if any of them do it will be because of the inspiration provided by Roam.

Kerim

P. Kerim Friedman is a professor in the Department of Ethnic Relations and Cultures at National Dong Hwa University in Taiwan. His research explores language revitalization efforts among indigenous Taiwanese, looking at the relationship between language ideology, indigeneity, and political economy. An ethnographic filmmaker, he co-produced the Jean Rouch award-winning documentary, ‘Please Don’t Beat Me, Sir!’ about a street theater troupe from one of India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes (DNTs).

kerim.oxus.net/

Source

My lower back is sore. There’s a tension that’s rising from the place where my neck meets my scalp, and my eyes feel baggy. I’ve just woken up, am standing in my friends’ apartment. M and F have graciously agreed to host me for umpteenth time in what feels like as many months. It’s not yet 8am. F is in the shower, M is making a weak cup of coffee. M and I are discussing what the hell it is I’m doing with my fieldwork.

Mostly, I’m complaining. 

I slide the couch cushions back into their upright sentinel positions, transforming my temporary bed back into the living room couch. M insists with sympathy that the way I’ve been travelling has to affect the research I’m doing. “Couches, sore backs, breakfast with friends.” She insists there’s also a lot to think about in all of my expressed fieldwork frustrations. All the waiting, the unanswered emails, the phone calls and conference calls, negotiations and navigations, “all the frustrating stuff in your field journal,” she says.

My field journals and my research follow the communities of organizations working in the murky middle ground between climate change science and climate politics. Consistent with their work, my fieldwork has been episodic, partly itinerant and sometimes worked remotely or by telecommuting.

This work has felt fruitful yet fitful at best, disheartening at worst. I’ve frequently asked myself the question in the image that opens this post. Messages in the dark, emails sent across the void—is this really what research looks like, what it feels like? What does it mean, analytically, to sort through this frustration? In the rest of this post, I reflect on fieldwork in this murky space.

~

How is it, one friend asked me during a field trip back to Montreal, to do research on people who work on global climate change from an office with one or two other people? What does it mean to be thinking and working with these people from afar—from a room in my mother’s house, in which I passed years of dreamless nights, slowly growing up as the world grew slowly warmer?

I know I’m not alone in wanting to articulate the ambiguous affect or feelings of my doctoral fieldwork. Questioning, complaining, waiting: in many ways my fieldwork has been similar to the experiences of peers. Unlike researchers in the “hard” sciences, as anthropologists we’re expected to do year-long field research as individuals, away from our support networks. This expectation exists latently despite changing sentiments in the discipline in the last thirty or forty years. Following the model of the wartime exile, Bronislaw Malinowski, we embark on a self-isolationist rite of passage that teaches us to ignore both the social and citational supports that hold us up. In truth, we rely heavily on the support of not only faraway supervisors, but, especially, friends, colleagues and family.

Along the way we unsurprisingly experience some loneliness. We inevitably wallow some in self-doubt about what it is, exactly, we’re studying out here in the field. We question our abilities to accurately capture it, to do it justice, to make it legible or feel-able. We often feel confusion about our own roles among the people we study. For those of us whose topics of study require research at multiple sites, the isolation of the field can settle in hard as we keep moving to follow the object, question or people of our study. For those of us who are differently abled or have chronic health issues, visibly or invisibly, difficulties are compounded. Even those of us pale males, for whom the institutions of our society have largely been built to hold up, experience some degree of these hardships in the field. All of my colleagues have expressed similar feelings over the course of their research.

On the other hand, my experience of fieldwork in the murky middle of climate change science and action has been different than the general experience. My combination of multi-sited, itinerant and remote research has led me into murky affective territory, mixing familial obligations with field observations, hometown blues with fieldwork milieus.

Skype conversations with potential field collaborators conducted from my mother’s house often left my head spinning in a blur of past and future lives. Other parts of fieldwork had me feeling dislocated not in time, but place: interviews or conference calls from temporary rented apartments, back in the city I apparently call home, where my life-in-things lies waiting in storage. At other times fieldwork has felt joyful, exhilarating, but brief: staying with old friends in unfamiliar towns, fleetingly meeting familiar faces in person for the first time after months of remotely working together. There is a lot to think about, too, in all of my fieldwork frustrations about access to the field, a conversation that will be continued in subsequent posts.

These fieldwork feelings have led me to recognize that the flow of this type of fieldwork is murky or less than clear, that it has periods of activity and inactivity, isolation and socialization. It has taught me to accept that access will not often be easy, dozens of emails will remain unread, potential next steps never taken. Thinking about the murky affect of my fieldwork has illuminated the networks of support that I know all of us rely on, despite, or because of, our discipline’s penchant for peddling a fantasy of individualized fieldwork. I’m moved to ask what supports other fieldworkers lean on. Mine have come in the form of friends, family, writing groups, reading groups, medical professionals and tabletop role-playing adventuring parties.

If we want to study certain things, we have to do a certain kind of fieldwork—a consistency between content and form. My fieldwork on those working between climate science and politics has presented some peculiar affective hurdles, and even some bodily hurt. These obstacles can be said to be a shared among most fieldworkers, but are particularly plain to see in institutional, remote, itinerant or multi-sited fieldwork. As first fieldwork projects continue to negotiate the limits of the fieldwork paradigm, how can we ensure that succeeding anthropological generations remain prepared for the cutting edge? Follow the conversation to the next post, as we take a closer look at this fieldwork in action around the edges of a major climate change summit.

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

Source

“There are many reasons why people in our field work remotely,” one data analytics coordinator tells me. We are talking on the phone one afternoon, me from the far East Coast, him from the flat Midwest, having met each other at the Global Climate Action Summit on the West Coast. He continues. For one, it’s more sustainable. Plus it’s 2018, he says, we have the technology, so why not? This allows them to draw from a diverse and well qualified pool of staff and collaborators from all over the globe. Climate change is a global issue. He mentions the practical reason that you need people on the ground in and from local communities to understand the socio-political, economic and environmental issues related to his organization’s work on climate. Sure, he finishes, the staff get together twice a year, and they appreciate this face-to-face time, but they really value cutting down on travel. They are a climate change communication and mitigation organization, after all. I nod periodically. Remembering he can’t see me, I grunt or “hmm” at the appropriate times, thoughts racing at these mundane revelations.

Is this what fieldwork in the “murky middle” between political practice and scientific or technical knowledge looks like? I ended my first post this month with a series of questions about how an anthropology of climate change manifests when it explores other venues than the impacts of climate change. In this post I go deeper. What does anthropological research look like not among climate scientists or international policy negotiators, but, rather, with conveners of states and regional governments interested in working on climate change? Or the technicians who provided the data analytics and interactive computer tools for decision support among high-level leaders and middle schoolers alike? Or even the experts that provide the scientifically accurate and public-appropriate messaging for the latest viral piece of climate journalism?

Here, I introduce the shape that this field, and therefore this kind of fieldwork, between climate science and action can take. I also consider where this work takes place and how this milieu forces a change in the shape of research—or at least the shape it has taken during my own ongoing PhD research. This is also an attempt to open up a space for conversations in upcoming posts about the politics and affect (or emotions) of graduate student fieldwork, before leading to ethnographic anecdotes and reflections on the future.

Returning to the opening phone call, at the time I remember thinking that what my interlocutor was saying made perfect sense to me. It was completely reasonable, and perfectly quotidian. But the normality of it was surprising, and a bit disappointing. I became aware that I was hoping for more. I was holding out for a grand organizational philosophy or a complex strategic insight for why he and his colleagues, like so many others in this space, work remotely. Writing down his response in my notebook, I come to this realization. The mundane logic of telecommuting has largely structured my work and emotional life for the last year.

This is because my interlocutor’s organization, a non-governmental organization working on non-national climate action, is not unique in this regard. The murky middle ground of climate change work is made up of a diverse community of actors and techniques. Some are conveners, bringing together sub-national or national and international stakeholders from different states, in the face-to-face venues governments prefer. They often work closely with others who are policy coordinators and analysts, making sure climate policies add up and are consistent with scientific understandings. Others do data analytics or are technology developers, providing the tools and analysis to move knowledge and practice between what are deemed scientific and political realms. Yet others are science communicators, playing the role of translator for the public and leaders.

While most of these actors come from the non-profit world, academics are strewn throughout, collaborating and complementing existing work. Most people play multiple roles and the different types of climate actors often co-exist within the same organization. Yet most of the organizations I’ve followed so far are made up of people spread out across North America.1

They are staffed, if sometimes only partly, by telecommuters, who work remotely together—over conference calls and email. They periodically meet in person. Often these reunions occur at the diplomatic and organizing summits that are the culmination of months of work: this year’s Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco; the Climate Group’s Climate Week New York City; the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)’s meetings of scientists, or; the yearly COP (Conference of Parties) meetings of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change). This is the case at a 10-person U.S. non-profit modeling and communications think tank, as it is at the Canadian branch, consisting of 4 full time staff, of a large international non-profit network, and even some large, international climate NGOs. The exceptions are either the biggest international environmental NGOs or those that have small offices staffed by just a handful, often shared with other environmental or climate groups. A different interlocutor tells me that, in his organization, “the operations/logistics person and the domestic policy person stay home, but the rest of the staff move around a lot because this is what the work demands.”

Anthropologists attempt to let the shape of what they study dictate the shape of their research. In academic speak, this means that we allow our objects of study and their manifestations to provincialize us, as Povinelli (2016) has recently put it. In other words, how we do fieldwork should follow after what we work on. In my case, the structure and logic of how my chosen object of research organizes itself out in the world has inevitably and necessarily changed the shape and methods of my doctoral fieldwork.

I realized early on that if much, but not all, of the work of the organizations working to bridge the gaps between climate change science and climate politics is realized remotely, my fieldwork would have to be follow suit. This has meant conducting interviews and casual conversations over the phone and video chat; sitting in and participating in conference calls and webinars; engaging in fleeting in- person meetings over coffee and between presentations; and travelling to conference and summits, the culmination of months of my field collaborators’ work. Currently in the murky middle of my research on the murky middle, the shape of this research is bound to continue to transform.

Before we dive into the ethnographic detail of a case study later this month, in the next post I explore how “murky” plays out as an affect for this type of fieldworking itself. I muse over the complicated nature–and the potential limits—of conducting first (doctoral) fieldwork like this; I reflect on power, positionality and the ethics of “studying up.”

References

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2016 Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke Univ Pr.

1.  Note that, although anthropogenic climate change is a global issue, I’ve focused my PhD research on actors working mainly from North America. This was a strategic and methodological choice. ↩

Adam Fleischmann

Adam Fleischmann is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Montréal, Québec, located on unceded Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe territories. His research looks at the community of non-state climate change actors at the intersection of science, politics and technology.

Source

Three Lies of Digital Ethnography
by Gabriele de Seta

We ethnographers cannot help but lie, but in lying, we reveal truths that escape those who are not so bold. (Fine, 1993, p. 290)

Let’s start with a conclusion: Ethnographers lie.

This might not be a widely shared proposition, but I experience it often in my own work, especially when talking in practical terms about my fieldwork. The more the weeks of traveling between Chinese cities, staying at friends’ houses and transcribing their social media interactions recede back into the past, the more I doubt about the scholarly value of the ethnographic study of digital folklore I say I have conducted. I realize that an assemblage of disciplinary imperatives, epistemological nudges and promises of legitimation I have internalized during my scholarly formation keeps determining how I carefully massage the description of my research project according to the needs of the moment.

As I distort my fieldwork experience into elevator pitches and small talk during conference breaks, I realize that I am enacting the gentle calisthenics of professionalism and persuasion. Like a well-trained marketer, I avoid discussing the challenging aspects of my research or my actual methodological practices, and instead piece together strings of buzzwords and abstracted data points intended to prove my disciplinary belonging – I simplify some things, hide others, and casually lie when convenient.

Despite the unpleasant aftertaste of these performances, the tensions motivating my resort to half-truths, strategic simplifications and circumstantial lies are nothing new: Like many other academic domains, anthropology has its own disciplinary culture, and methodology is perhaps the level at which disciplinary discursivity is at its most evident. Foregrounding the spatial and temporal dimensions of one’s fieldwork remains a reliable marker of authority, and narrowing down one’s interests to a bounded community and a well-defined topic still helps expert validation.

At the same time, the relative novelty of certain research domains (in my case, vernacular creativity on digital media) makes them more prone to generalizations, and requires simplifying the presentation of one’s work when pushing back against insinuations of “having it too easy” with fieldwork done by “simply spending all day on social media” to follow “fashionable topics” such as Internet memes, selfies or online celebrity.

One of the pieces of writing that most helped me come to terms with this feeling of unease is a Gary Alan Fine article titled “Ten lies of ethnography” (1993). In this liberating piece, Fine skirts the fascination for laying bare the uncomfortable truths of the trade, and instead focuses on the unavoidable practices of lying that accompany much ethnographic research. According to Fine, illusions about the underside of ethnography, regularly hidden in its methodological backstage, are necessary for both the production of good work and occupational survival, but become problematic when they take root in the discipline and become taken for real by its practitioners.

Inspired by how Fine identifies ten lies of ethnography behind the classical virtues and technical skills of figures such as the “friendly ethnographer,” the “unobtrusive ethnographer” and the “chaste ethnographer”, I want to put forward three more lies peculiar to digital ethnography, which I briefly describe below, accompanied by their respective authorial archetypes.

The networked field-weaver

The first lie of digital ethnography is related to one of the most widely debated ethnographic constructions – the ‘field’. Questioned, fragmented and deconstructed in the wake of the writing culture debates, the field remains an important anchor for ethnographic practice. When I embarked into my (by then overly-theorized) fieldwork, the most convincing metaphor I had come across was the one offered by Jenna Burrell in her proposition of the “field site as network” (2009). Building upon previous theorizations of multi-sited ethnography, Burrell emphasizes how it is the ethnographer herself, through the everyday tracing of different actors, that pulls together the field as a network.

I found myself adopting Burrell’s insight as an effective soundbite: My own “field as network” included a bunch of friend and acquaintances, longer and shorter stays in eight Chinese cities, a number of online platforms, an inventory of mobile devices, a sample of linguistic repertoires, certain genres of online content, mass media discourses about the internet, and a variety of media practices.

As many solutions that seem to work all too well, I started realizing that my idealized reliance on weaving my field as a network was built on hiding and lying about something. Rather than experiencing the expansive movement of branching out promised by this metaphor, I often found myself building my “field as network” by grasping at straws, and immediately cutting away most of what came along with them. Weaving networks into an ethnographic field can bring the most disparate things together, and particularly when one’s research topic isn’t extremely narrow, each node of the network can result in dizzying vertigos over a wealth of potential interlocutors, unexplored communities, or entirely new categories of data.

In order to decide what does or doesn’t belong in one’s research project (and, ultimately, to produce a viable written report) the ethnographer continuously prunes down networks as they proliferate, carving out a skeletal “field as network” that eventually feels more like a crooked bonsai tree than an expanse of thick experiential wilderness. The lie of the ethnographer as networked field-weaver should be kept in mind as it hides the cutting as much it glorifies the pulling together.

The eager participant-lurker

The second lie of digital ethnography relates to the central practice of this research approach: Participant observation. Participation in digital media bleeds over a linear spectrum going from non-use to intensive and active presence, and extends in different dimensions according to the platforms used, the devices at hand, software availability, access to connectivity in time and space, as well as the social circles and practices one participates in.

In the earliest pioneering ethnographies of online settings, researchers found in the figure of the ‘lurker’ a productive archetype embodying the contradictory status of participation on the internet. Reflecting on this figure of participation, Leander & McKim (2003) conclude that, in choosing between being an active participant or a lurker, a digital ethnographer makes important epistemological decisions. Given the increasing variety of modes of participation offered by digital media platforms, more recent debates have tried to move beyond a clear-cut choice between active participation and lurking, and to instead explore the creation of intersubjectivity as a fluid outcome of a sustained ethnographic engagement (Beaulieau, 2004).

While cognizant of this fluid spectrum of modes of participation, I still feel the need to condense my engagement into simplified vignettes highlighting my presence in various digitally-mediated contexts, flattening my involvement into easily understandable nuggets of interaction that prove my active participation in the field. Confronted by the injunctions of participant observation, I often write myself into an eager participant-lurker: A professionally naive explorer of local online contexts, master of all modes of participation, surveying digital media use from a vantage point of carefully crafted presence.

The false choice between naturalist lurking and active involvement is something I still struggle with whenever I inscribe myself onto the field. As digital ethnographers, we participate (just like our ‘research participants’) through a wide range of modes of participation tightly linked to social dynamics and technological affordances that go from the choice of shutting off one’s smartphone to the visceral need to sustain one’s presence in a tense online discussion. Embracing the fluidity, uncertainty and ambivalence resulting from these situated choices should be preferred over flattening one’s own persona into the stereotyped figure of the eager participant-lurker.

The expert fabricator

The third lie of digital ethnography has to do with representation, an unavoidable component of producing any sort of research output. Digital ethnographers have the advantage of working with already thoroughly-mediated settings, and are able to include in their reports samples of online resources, snippets of mediated interactions, creative data visualizations, as well as images, videos and sounds. Yet, the increasing availability of multimedia traces does not mean that ethnographic texts become less representational. Even when grounded on extensive datasets, hundreds of fieldnotes and collections of user traces, the accounts produced by digital ethnographers end up including an extremely narrow selection of inscriptions, often thoroughly edited, translated, scrambled, rephrased, anonymized, cropped, selectively blurred and collated according to a bundle of ethical, rhetorical and aesthetic decisions.

Responding to the recurring dilemmas faced by researchers dealing with new and heterogeneous concretions of data, Annette Markham provocatively argues that digital ethnographers should embrace the suspicious practice of fabrication in order to overcome paralyzing tendencies in qualitative research, and to embed ethics inductively into research practice (2012, p. 341). Fabrication, though, is inextricably linked to the idea of expertise. In claiming and embracing one’s role as editor, translator and fabricator of multimedia composites of events, identities and inscriptions, the digital ethnographer implicitly establishes competence and knowledgeability over a certain sociotechnical context.

While I enjoy the flattering attributions of expertise over my research topic that these fabrications occasionally grant me, I often feel troubled by the way they blur my authorial role into the figure of the social media savvy or the computer geek, hiding how most of my ethnographic knowledge is actually grounded on a patchy process of discovery, a messy interaction between my puzzled inquiries and the kind help of patient friends who bear with my often clueless questions about the latest Internet meme or slang term.

Digital ethnographers are often closer to practical brokers, curious newcomers relying on the knowledgeability and interpretive guidance of what Holmes & Marcus call “paraethnographers” (2008). It is important to remember how the figure of the expert fabricator can become an enticing professional illusion that easily overrides the messy, processual and thickly social construction of local expertise.

How to lie with digital ethnography

The goal of this post is decidedly not to “tell the truth” in the (ideally) public space of an academic blog, nor to reveal an ugly or cynical reality behind my practice of digital ethnography, nor to accuse colleagues of engaging in dishonesty and deception; rather, the three illusive figures described above embody discursive strategies, performative misdirections and illusory identities that I regularly confront in my thinking, speaking and writing about my own research work.

My hope is that both colleagues approaching the disciplinary domain of digital ethnography, as well as fellow researchers already familiar with this methodological assemblage, will recognize their own doubts and concerns in some of these sketched portraits. As Gary Alan Fine reminds us, it is important to constantly ask ourselves: Which professional illusions are current in our research field? Which issues do we pressure each other to devise half-truths about? Which circumstantial lies do we use to cover the tracks leading to our decisions?

Rather than telling readers how to ‘do’ digital ethnography, I’d rather suggest that we familiarize ourselves with the lies hidden by the contemporary archetypes of the networked field-weaver, the eager participant-lurker and the expert fabricator, before they become professional illusions hiding more than they reveal.

Image credits: This essay is illustrated by @deathnography

Dr Gabriele de Seta is a media anthropologist. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and has recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, Internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice. More information is available on his website.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

Source

Private Messages from the Field: Confessions on Digital Ethnography and Its Discomforts
by Crystal Abidin & Gabriele de Seta

Here’s a first confession about ethnographic work: All professional things have personal beginnings.

We are today writing this introduction as editors of a series of confessional posts about the discomforts of digital ethnography, but we met three years ago at a pub table, two doctoral candidates sharing a brief moment of co-presence right in the middle of a graduate summer school. Sitting in front of each other for the first time in a week, we broke the ice by latching on sparse disciplinary markers we had been peppering our public utterances with, hoping for someone to notice. The summer school we were attending was a decidedly interdisciplinary event, and retreating into a common discursive domain was a cozy convenience: “So… are you an anthropologist? Who is your go-to author?”

Namedropping snowballed. What digital media did we study, where, and how did we go about it? The loud conversations piling up across the long pub table receded into the background as we masked intimate feeling out with ethnographic geeking out. For the following week of seminars, our backstage dialogues originating at a pub table continued as an exchange of direct messages on Twitter – we did truly slide in each other’s DMs before it was even a meme. After we left the summer school, the social media private message backchannel remained our go-to pocket of intimacy for any communication that didn’t belong to e-mail, Facebook comments or postcards.

For a long while, this newfound space seemed to us truly special and unique. And it still does today, to be honest, every time we scroll upwards into thousands of daily textual exchanges peppered with images, reaction GIFs, emoji, and URLs: a running stream of co-constructed presence bridging over time zones and life stages, that has over the years become an intimate archive of the theoretical, methodological, practical, professional, affective and emotional struggles of two early-career academics who still find important to brand themselves as ‘digital ethnographers’.

And yet, in time, we have also come to realize that this secret pouch of Twitter DMs was just one example of a communication genre we have broadly termed ‘private messages from the field’: intimate backchannels precariously established and dedicatedly sustained by ethnographers away from their professional fronts, a variety of relational spaces ranging from cozy post-conference pub retreats to digital versions of Ray Oldenburg’s “third places” (1989). Many of our colleagues turned out to be also sharing their troubles through mailing lists and Facebook groups, WhatsApp conversations and Skype calls; social media privacy settings were adjusted to select the appropriate audiences for emotional rants and disciplinary venting, while multimodality helped bringing reciprocal care and careful intimacy into the backstage of an often geographically dispersed profession.

We like to think that one of the first ‘private messages from the field’ was sent by Jen Clodius, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was doing research on community formation in Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs). In a “Report from the field” that she shared with other AAA Anthropology Newsletter readers in 1994, she warned: “Conducting ethnography on the InterNet presents a whole new series of chalenges and problems for the anthropologist.” These challenges and problems included issues of identity and performativity, authenticity and trust, community rules and moral norms, as well as complex and shifting ethical dilemmas.

More than two decades after Clodius’s field report from the world of MUDs, doing research on, through and about digital media remains challenging and problematic, a state of epistemological uncertainty that is compounded and perhaps even amplified by the relative novelty of sociotechnical arrangements and the quick turnover of platforms and services. And yet, despite the refinement of ‘digital ethnography’ into countless disciplinary variants, most methodological manuals pay little attention to how digital ethnographers themselves cope with these challenges and problems by exchanging private messages from the field through the very same digital media they do research through, on and about.

For this reason, years after our summer school pub encounter, and thousands of Twitter DMs later, we have decided to open up our private message folders, so to say, and put together a collection of essays illustrating the messiness of digital media research in the making. In order to give our essays an intimate, personal perspective, we have encouraged authors to draw their inspiration from a couple of sources: the genre of confessional ethnographic writing outlined by John Van Maanen (2011), and the unabashed disclosure of what Gary Alan Fine (1993) calls the “lies of ethnography”. Our hope is that, by confessing troubling epistemological choices and sharing our ways of coping with methodological discomforts, we contribute to demystifying disciplinary canons and reminding readers of how digital media (and the ways of researching them) are always in the making.

There is no denying it: The practice of digital ethnography entails anxieties, challenges, concerns, dilemmas, doubts, problems, tensions and troubles; and it is not a surprise that many researchers that decide to adopt an ethnographic approach to study digital media end up dedicating some thought and writing to these methodological discomforts. Rather than delving into sectarian discussions of the sub-branding and out-branching of the (broadly intended) disciplinary domain of digital ethnography, the posts featured in this series respond to a call beautifully formulated by John Law in his book After Method:

Parts of the world are caught in our ethnographies, our histories and our statistics. But other parts are not, or if they are then this is because they have been distorted into clarity. […] Perhaps we will need to know them through ‘private’ emotions that open us to worlds of sensibilities, passions, intuitions, fears and betrayals. (2004, pp. 2-3)

This is the goal of this series of posts: to get to know and talk about parts of our worlds that are not usually caught in our digital ethnographies, and to do so through private emotions, discomforting confessions and shared intimacies. We would do this work through our private messages anyway, so we might as well open it up for once, and try to welcome readers to the field of a “digital ethnography” intended less as a prescriptive collection of research strategies and more as an inclusive methodological common ground for scholars doing ethnographic research on, through and about digital media.

Private Messages from the Field is a collection of posts that summarize the contents of a yet unpublished journal issue which the editors have been working on during the past year. These sneak peeks into our arguments, kindly hosted by anthro{dendum}, are a precious occasion for our authors to float a few ideas about the discomforts of doing digital ethnography for a broader audience before they become inevitably “distorted into clarity” by peer-review, revisions and paywalls. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in various global contexts (Australia, China, Singapore, Sweden) on topics ranging from the dark web to collaborative translation, and from internet celebrity to organizational media use, the posts collected in this series are offered as comforting missives to anthropology students, early-career researchers and seasoned scholars dabbling in the troubling but rewarding practice of digital ethnography.

If you have any comments, you are welcome to send us a private message.

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. Her forthcoming books look at internet celebrity, Influencers, blogshops, and Instagram cultures. Crystal is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

Dr Gabriele de Seta is a media anthropologist. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and has recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan. His research work, grounded on ethnographic engagement across multiple sites, focuses on digital media practices and vernacular creativity in contemporary China. He is also interested in experimental music scenes, Internet art, and collaborative intersections between anthropology and art practice. More information is available on his website.

The editors contributed equally to this project and are named alphabetically.

We are seeking academic journals to publish the edited collection of full-length articles on which this collection of blogposts are based, and would love to hear from interested parties.

Crystal Abidin

Dr Crystal Abidin is a socio-cultural anthropologist of vernacular internet cultures, particularly young people’s relationships with internet celebrity, self-curation, and vulnerability. She is Postdoctoral Fellow with the Media Management and Transformation Centre (MMTC) at Jönköping University, and Adjunct Researcher with the Centre for Culture and Technology (CCAT) at Curtin University. Crystal’s forthcoming book, Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online (Emerald Publishing, 2018) critically analyzes the contemporary histories and impacts of internet-native celebrity today. Reach her at wishcrys.com or @wishcrys.

Source