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).