Is it simply the nature of digital research?
One of the things that struck me during the symposium, is that the majority (although not all) of the research methods we discussed reflected some form of auto-ethnographic work. During a small conversation with Jeffrey Bardzell, I proposed that it was because of the nature of digital research - it was done 'through a computer'. He was as confused as I was by my own question.
I have been wondering, was the large portion of auto-ethnographic work due to the fact that it was a social sciences and humanities based crowd? Or was it due to the fact - as was my thought - that the "field site" is essentially a solitary space or rather, because entry to the field site is done through a computer, which implies some sort of personal element? I know this is not very clear... how to rephrase this ....
Does alot of digital community and play research start with the researcher because the nature of the research requires that they researcher bear some level of participant in order to observe the phenomena they are studying?
Any ideas on this would be great, as I am trying to put my finger on why so much work that I read in digital studies (that is non quantitative) starts from the inside out.
I have been wondering, was the large portion of auto-ethnographic work due to the fact that it was a social sciences and humanities based crowd? Or was it due to the fact - as was my thought - that the "field site" is essentially a solitary space or rather, because entry to the field site is done through a computer, which implies some sort of personal element? I know this is not very clear... how to rephrase this ....
Does alot of digital community and play research start with the researcher because the nature of the research requires that they researcher bear some level of participant in order to observe the phenomena they are studying?
Any ideas on this would be great, as I am trying to put my finger on why so much work that I read in digital studies (that is non quantitative) starts from the inside out.
posted by Kelly at
20:19
8 Comments:
OK, a bit jumbly but I think I get what you're getting at ;-)
Part of it might just be a skewed sample-- I've never been to a digital media conference with such a heavy focus on ethnography, although I have been to ones with a somewhat strong emphasis on textual analysis, and/or quantitative methodologies (such as data tracking or even surveying). Maybe it had something to do with the distribution or the wording of the call? Not than it matters-- I didn't have a problem with the overall emphasis on soc/anth methodologies.
But back to auto-ethnography... I think the issue is that all social science research is viewed through the self; the computer just foregrounds this element. As a result, I don't know if people feel because their presence is obviously 'non-naturalistic' that auto-ethnography readily springs to mind as a methodology, or that the 'auto' gets tacked on when they start to conflate self and avatar. I think the online space can jumble participant observation modes (e.g. are you a participant, in the traditional sense, if you are just using your avatar as a camera to view the online group?) It might have been nice to have had some of these issues addressed at the conference.
It also, at least in game studies, might have something to do with the backlash several years back surrounding a perceived group of academic researchers who 'didn't play the games'. Maybe now we're just seeing a swing to the other side: researchers who play the games a lot and want to document their experiences as research. My only fear is that as academic researchers, we're an intensely privileged lot (and tacking into another conversation our kids are a privileged lot), and that sometimes the approach isn't the most rigourous or unique.
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Anonymous, at 14/11/06 10:46 a.m.
I don't think the call was the issue because organizers can't control the directions in which a larger field of researchers contextualize and decide on what is important about their work. I also disagree that ethnography is only a sociology or anthropology methodology. I can think of several IT, communications, performing arts, education and engineering colleagues who'd be surprised to hear that their own observation and reporting methods around social phenomenon are discounted in this claim. I'd also argue that surveying is not an inherently quantitative method -- the moment a survey allows for open-ended response boxes, it leaves the realm of numbers.
At the same time, the question of why so many of the methods that came out during the symposium were auto-ethnographic can, from my view and what I hear, sadly be summed up in a single word: consent. What came through loud and clear for me was that doing group research with non-family members was a messy morass of consent, ethics, questionable truth-telling, etc. Thus, when exploring ideas about certain kinds of research and coming up with theories around them, auto and family ethnographies seem to be seen as a way of avoiding and averting this messiness. And I agree that some of it has come from the "insider vs outsider" debate that is always present in research about social spaces. The current trend is that you have to game to be a researcher, so yes I think that is structuring digital methods right now.
I also think that part of the reason for this focus on the researcher outward has to do with the continued implicit bias against the idea of there being a 'there there" to research, from funders perspectives and the like. Much of the larger scale research around digital life is quantitative and inherently reductionist and I absolutely believe that this comes from the idea that digital space isn't yet validated as being just as "living" as the non-digital, as being as real as the apparent Real.
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Anonymous, at 15/11/06 8:11 a.m.
True, organizers have to work with the proposals they get (don't I know!), but what I was trying to say is that I don't believe this follows any wider trend towards particular methods overall. Obviously, this depends on your field of interest.
I don't believe I claimed ethnography was exclusively a soc or anth methodology-- that's just silly. However, it does dominate these disciplines and, I believe (but I could be wrong) historically hails from them. I don't see how work in performing arts (for example) would be discounted by using a method prominant in (for example) anthropology-- if anything, its been my experience that exploring cross-discipline methodologies can be rich.
But yes, consent: huge issue. Ever try to track down the real life person behind the virtual persona you need consent from? Yikes! And it's certainly cheaper to study ourselves and our families-- no question-- so when the funds aren't there, I think the research has to make compromises. I do worry, though, about the impact of these compromises-- and I hope its something we look at further.
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Anonymous, at 15/11/06 1:24 p.m.
ok i'll weigh in on this... I think Kelly is on to something and I prefer not to think that good social science is essentially lazy about consent (its more difficult to get consent now but not that difficult... everybody likes excuses).
If auto-ethnographic research is simply convienient then it isn't good research in my book. Good research has to be inconvienient by definition (Goffman once said something like this so i'm cribbing).
So I prefer to accept Kelly's working hypothesis that there is something about the phenomenon itself that lends itself to the mostly forgotten and ill-understood method of auto-ethnography.
In my own past studying science we know that auto-experimentation has been extremely common in the natural sciences starting with the likes of Newton himself who performed all sorts of experiments on his self and body. These guys wrote obsessively about the importance of understanding the phenomenon under investigation in a more than purely rational way -- indeed they wanted to embody the phenomenon... to live it and therefore to become it or possess it or whatever.
The fact is good autoethnography is like autoexperimentation extremely tedious, myopic and often traumatic work... did anyone mention David Sudnow's most famous "ways of the hand" at T&T?
But the phenomenon of digital anything begs for an experiential method of this kind (rather than surveys, interviews and the like) because the phenomenon exists in fact in our bodily experience of it... especially if we insist on using metaphors of transportation and immersion and the like. Thus we are not wondering about what people know about what they are doing, we are wondering about the embodied experience that they in fact have no ability to articulate - words fail them, and even when they don't the words are extremely poor substitutes for their experience. Whats worse is that they know it and so do we...
So I missed it all alas, but its all very timely we are still in very new methodological territory here and people I think - are still just figuring that out.
-bart
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Anonymous, at 16/11/06 11:00 a.m.
I have in my head this image of Newton himself sitting under the apple tree, vs. Newton sitting in the apple tree dropping apples on the heads of others.
Yes, the former certainly better.
Against my better judgement, I'm still going to press the point about auto-ethnography, academics and privilege. I'm not disputing the universiality of Newton's work (until of course I just fly up into space), but I think there are also circumstances where we've now had to go back and reconsider that we're not all well off, white, European males: particularly in the medical sciences. I don't mean to imply auto-experimentation (or experimenting on our kids and partners...because lets face it, that's just fun) is deeply flawed... but it still concerns me, on some level, and talking about it helps alleviate some of that concern (for me).
I would dispute the argument that the phenomenon of digital anything relies on our personal experience as coming from certain research perspectives and disciplines more than others ...no? Cyberspace more than most things, perhaps, as a social construct. But of course there is certainly very real digital research going on in, perhaps, the physics of microchips or some such that really lies outside my personal experience (except in the most abstract way). Sorry for the semantic nitpicking. More to the point though... while you could look at, say, Edward Castronova's economics work from a social perspective, I'm pretty sure he's more focused on the numbers...and those numbers are still important. And this, too, is cyberspace research. I think.
Also, since there's this very wee opening (lol): isn't art a wonderful way to express the verbally inarticulable! Of course, it's not auto-ethnography then...its practice-based research...
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Anonymous, at 16/11/06 2:34 p.m.
Interesting perspectives. What I find most interesting, is how there seems to be a division along disciplinary lines. I might be reading too much into it though. I know that the comments arent truly intended to point to one method being "better" than an other. As the goal of the symposium was to show the need for a merging of methods from various disciplines, and in many presentations, this was indeed the case.
On some level though, looking at purely qualitative methods - and aiming at understanding cyberspace as a space - as a "cultural phenomena" does the materiality of the pc as something that requires an individual to sit at and "log on" to affect the method chosen?
As Shanly and I discussed in the Graduate Seminar on Wednesday, some types of interaction - either online or in play with a console, seems to occur in the space between player and game, 'user' and cyberspace. Headspace as Bart mentioned in class a few weeks back. So besides interviews with participants, and visual methods (recording play sessions with and without audio) and any other research methods we can think of that lends itself to our goals, how can we get to understand that relationship between user and cyberspace, player and a game?
I think the only answer really, is that each research question requires a different set of methods to get to its core. So while in my work, I would argue that it is necessary to begin from the inside out (how can I talk about the intricate nature and complex web of identity in game play without starting from a point of self understanding?) While for other questions in identity theory aim for generalizability and their methods lend themselves well to their questions and goals.
In the end, maybe it isnt about the materiality, the space or the discipline, but rather about the research question itself.
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Kelly, at 16/11/06 8:19 p.m.
well sheesh - I didn't know this was about disciplinary policing. I thought this was about the tendancy to inward-looking subjective style methodology in online research and how digital stuff is well suited to autowhatchamacallit... it is surely not the only method but Kelly wondered about why so much self-study going on amongst social scientists... btw Artists are among the most amazing autoexperimentalists they just tend to not write things down... oh and Newton was an alchemist before the apples - he liked to poison himself to see what would happen. Its true you have to be priviledged (and have a good doctor) to get into that kind of action but as I recall autoethnography was pioneered by second wave feminist social scientists of the standpoint variety... really an important way of cutting through the objectivist crapola that has since been banished as legitimate methodology in social science.
...and its not that some experience is inarticulable and so demands art instead of ethnography its just that the ethnographic stock in trade is to try to work it through in writing... and I got no problem with Ted Castronova's numbers game as long as he doesn't fob it off on others or slag my posse (which he does but I can take it)...
... and I thought this was really an ontological issue -- shit -- wrong blog :-)
-bart
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Anonymous, at 16/11/06 9:55 p.m.
I keep coming back to the "is it in the materiality of the object" question to be quite honest! In a similar vein of a question posed in my Material Culture coursepack "is the tomato picker a politicized object" in it's materiality?
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Kelly, at 16/11/06 10:19 p.m.
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