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- Convenors:
-
Karen Silva Torres
(University of Leipzig)
Henrike Neuhaus (NRI, University of Greenwich)
Jessica Steinman (Universität Leipzig)
Suvi Rautio (University of Helsinki)
Phill Wilcox (Bielefeld University)
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- Formats:
- Roundtables
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The roundtable will examine how digital technologies impact the anthropological methodology by discussing issues related to the ethics of digital research, the contemporary understanding of the field site, public intimacy, data management, the notion of public/private, and online/offline identities.
Long Abstract:
Digital media penetrates into the minutiae of everyday life. As more and more of our lives are lived out online, we must raise questions about the role of digital media in research. Yet, despite the explosion of digitalisation in life, its use in research remains partial, under-used and under-discussed. Questions of how data gained through digital research can be managed, as well as how to best use new technologies in research, what this means for notions of public and private, as well as traditional ideas of the field-site are all issues underpinned by ideas of ethics and how ethical research should inform methodology in increasingly digitised worlds.
This roundtable will examine how digital technologies impact the anthropological methodology such as managing digital research ethically, understanding the field site in the contemporary age, questioning ideas of public and private expressions and differentiating between online and offline identities. The discussion will address the ideas of what Soysal (2010) terms public intimacy, management and, particularly, storage of data as well as how to engage in and with digital lives. Appointing the masses of accumulated digital data, this roundtable will reflect on how researchers deal with big data including traces that the researching bodies create over the course of the investigation and communication using digital technology.
Detecting new directions in the history of fieldwork engagement/methods, this round table attempts to place digital media firmly into a practical discussion about methodologies and to contribute to a framework about research ethics in the digital realm.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
I propose an analysis of digital environments as social spaces. In particular, collective blogs of war veterans as sites for social research. I want to explore the porosity between digital and non-digital practices and social dynamics on the study of mnemonic formation in online communities.
Paper long abstract:
In this presentation, I propose an analysis of digital environments as social spaces where daily practices are extended in time and space. Collective blogs of war veterans are here explored as sites for social research. In particular, the porosity between digital and non-digital practices and social dynamics on the study of mnemonic community formation. Thus, I will offer some answers to the following questions: How can the digital be explored in the field of memory studies through a digital ethnographic approach? What are the advantages and disadvantages of exploring ethnographic case studies that are based on communities formed on the internet? To do so, I will start by describing the research that leads to my forthcoming dissertation about digital memories of colonial war veterans and the representation of the colonial war (1961-1974) on Wikipedia. This last platform is analyzed as a site of knowledge production and sharing. Here the digital is a place of community formation and mnemonic (re)production, where the (re)mediation of private archives and the creation of mnemonic narratives about the past are made by a community of men assembled through the internet with the aim of making sense of striking and fragmented experience. A fragmented experience transformed into a whole by them in the process of history-making on collective blogs.
Paper short abstract:
An exploration of how social media has presented anthropological research into death and grief with new challenges such as omnipresent online traces, shifting presentations of the self, ethical algorithms, data storage and an online field-site.
Paper long abstract:
In a time in which the deaths of celebrities become hashtags on Twitter, we all have to face the question of what happens to our own digital afterlives, as well as those of our loved ones. Anthropological research into death and grief now faces new challenges: omnipresent online traces, ethical algorithms, data storage and an online field-site. Digital death: the ultimate clash of familiar human concepts of time with the ubiquitous computational time. Facebook and Instagram offer possibilities for "immortalisation" with a memorialised profile, Twitter only offers deletion. The need to humanise algorithms is now vital; 'people you may know' friend suggestions of the deceased aren't subtle. Cue companies offering to use AI to analyse activity and learn how to post for you after death. If the dead soon outnumber the living on Facebook, what happens to the feedback in social media research when it's the deceased generating data? This research began from a personal note following the death of my father. Unprepared, I found myself clinging to the digital traces that remained of him. Using participatory methods, I conversed with Facebook users who were vocalising a death on the platform. This research explores the presentation of the self across public platforms and negotiates a physical absence in light of a persistence digital presence. Essentially death is an inevitable accompaniment to our existence and, like in other fields, we are constantly catching up with technology and surrendering our control; this is no exception, perhaps we just need to acclimatise.
Paper short abstract:
Based on an ethnographic study conducted on Facebook groups for Vietnamese migrants in Taiwan, this paper focuses on my reflections on the challenges of virtual ethnography and my attempt to suggest new paths that can assist researchers in coping with the problematic aspects of virtual ethnography.
Paper long abstract:
The growing importance of SNSs and virtual methods of communications opens up new and exciting ways for anthropological research while simultaneously presents numerous methodological challenges for anthropologists. The redefinition of the fieldsite proposed by internet-based studies and the expanded possibilities of conducting qualitative research requires a thorough examination of whether the traditional practices of anthropology are adequate for such research. By partaking in internet-based research, we choose to share and alter online spaces in which we research. Goodin (1985) suggested researchers are responsible for those who may be affected by our actions and choices, therefore, we must take into consideration how our participation in the internet-based fieldsite will affect the research process, the research participants, and ourselves.
Based on a virtual ethnographic study conducted on Facebook groups for Vietnamese migrants in Taiwan, this paper focuses on my reflections on the challenges and dilemmas of internet-based qualitative research. The paper describes the methodological issues resulting from Internet-based qualitative research. By posing the questions: how to position oneself as a researcher, how to deal with the identity of participants, how to manage data when anonymity is not enforced, and how to manage the boundaries in research relationships between researchers and participants, I reflect on the way in which researchers share and alter online spaces in which they conduct research and attempt to suggest new paths that can assist anthropologists in coping with the problematic aspects of internet-based ethnography.
Paper short abstract:
As a PhD student whose research examines, uses, and interrogates the use of digital technologies in anthropology, I aim to contribute to this roundtable through reflecting on the epistemological, ethical and methodological questions raised by my research as well as digital anthropology more broadly
Paper long abstract:
Digital technology has had an unprecedented impact on anthropology, not only opening doors to new areas for and subjects of anthropology research but also offering creative and innovative ways of doing anthropological research. As a current anthropology PhD student, my contributions to this roundtable orient around my ongoing fieldwork which uses digital technology as a topic of research as well as a way of conducting research. My PhD specifically uses single-player video games (SPVGs) as a lens to examine scientific and cultural ideas about personhood and the body to investigate what it means to be "human" in the "age of the machine".
Using an anthropological approach to personhood and the body, and video games it utilises the concept of "tracing the network" to trace networks of relations out from the player to game developers and AI developers to explore how ideas about humans and non-humans are co-produced, constructed in, articulated through and experienced, and examines the role that SPVGs play in mediating these relations and understandings. Furthermore, my research explores how digital technologies such as Twitch.tv, a live-streaming service for gamers, can be used to conduct anthropological research as well as interrogates the ethics of using such technologies: how consent be acquired in "public" digital spaces, how to preserve participant anonymity in an age of "googlability" (Varis, 2014) and how to ethically handle and store "eFieldnotes" (Sanjek and Tratner, 2016).
Paper short abstract:
Taking into account the challenges of an online-offline ethnographic fieldwork among Moroccan Islamist youth, I will discuss my ethical and methodological standpoints as an early stage researcher of a European project working on sensitive issues in a conflictual milieu.
Paper long abstract:
This paper stems from my current PhD research on the impact of digitization and multilingualism in the Islamist movements in Morocco, developed in the framework of the program H2020 MSCA-ITN MIDA ("Mediating Islam in the digital age"). As part of a European project, publishing data in Open Access platforms is strongly encouraged. However, asking for publishing authorizations and sharing contents can be really challenging in an environment such as of social media platforms (Facebook, You Tube, Telegram, and so on) where privacy policies are constantly changing and are often unclear, where "identities" are fluid and volatile, and where the topics discussed are often in tension with the established political regime. Where are the boundaries of an ethical standpoint when the researcher has to deal on the one hand with a sensitive fieldwork and on the other with specific requests as part of an international research project? Moreover, dealing with a politico-religious community often surveilled online and offline by the Moroccan regime, lifts not only methodological problems (gaining trust when entering the field), but also ethical dilemmas (preserving the interlocutor´s identity, and the safety of the researcher´s data). This paper aims at bringing at the roundtable these different issues, related both, not only to the ethnographic case I am exploring, but also to my experience as a researcher within a European project.