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- Convenors:
-
Frauke Rohden
(Chalmers University of Technology)
Sylvia Irene Lysgård (Oslo Metropolitan University)
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- Discussants:
-
Ingmar Lippert
(Goethe University Frankfurt)
Julie Sascia Mewes (TU Chemnitz MfN Berlin)
- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel focuses on method practices in digital fieldwork to foster discussions on digital ethnographic work in STS. Appreciating the performativity of methods as world-making, the interest lies in methodographies of how methods shape data and objectives, and methods’ relationship to the digital.
Long Abstract:
This panel focuses on care-ful explorations of method practice in digital fieldwork through methodography (Greiffenhagen et al., 2011; Lippert and Mewes, 2021), ethnographically describing and analysing how methods shape research in and of the digital towards societal transformation.
Beyond digital STS (Vertesi & Ribes 2019) and a narrow focus on natively digital methods applied to natively digital materials (Rogers 2019), more and more researchers are engaging with the digital in their work as digitalization increasingly transforms daily life. To account for the diversity of approaches, we define digital fieldwork (Lindgren 2019, Venturini & Rogers 2019) broadly to include virtual, digitized, and natively digital methods.
Ethnographic methods examining the complex and often messy interactions online offer valuable insights. However, 'the digital' poses new challenges regarding data management, privacy, and consent, as well as handling large amounts of collected data and platform terms of service. Adopting a reflexive approach that considers the makings and doings of digital fieldwork contributes to discussions on how methods can mobilize STS sensibilities and their transformative effects.
We are interested in reflexive accounts that inquire into formatting, standardising, re-presenting and performative engagements as care-ful STS method practice (Law & Lin, 2022; Mewes & Lippert, 2024). Our objective is to facilitate a conversation about how we configure accountability between researchers, our subjects, objects and devices, while attending to how these assemblages are generative of the objects we study (cf. Kenney 2015).
We invite papers methodographically engaging with their “doings of data”, concerned with the practicalities and performativities of conducting various modes of digital fieldwork. We have a specific interest in methodographic approaches - not prescriptive methodologies – on how their methods shape data and objectives, as well as their relationship to 'the digital'.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Katharina Berr (Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society) Jana Pannier (Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society)
Long abstract:
This project spotlights a digital practice that has spilled over from everyday media use to qualitative research: taking screenshots. While we presume that screenshots are frequently employed as digital research method and data, they are rarely mentioned or discussed in methods sections. We argue that both the ethical uneasiness of taking and using screenshots for research and their apparent bulkiness among other digital methods may have led to this methodological invisibility.
At the same time, screenshots hold great potential for digital fieldwork. For example, they can contain rich information about affordances and aesthetics of a digital fieldsite, enable the capture of increasingly ephemeral digital cultures, allow for rare shared insights into opaque algorithmic systems, and provide context to the researcher’s positionality. Working with screenshots is also a simple and therefore highly inclusive data collection practice, which allows for generative interactions with research participants.
Drawing on experiences from our own research – and inviting others to share theirs – we will outline and critically reflect on the use of screenshots in qualitative research and ethnographic practice along the research process, from data collection to analysis and illustration. This includes critical reflections on research ethics, positionality, and the limitations and potentials of such visual artefacts in digital research designs.
Madisson Whitman (Columbia University) Jordan Brensinger
Long abstract:
Digital technology platforms increasingly mediate researcher-participant relationships and transform longstanding approaches to privacy and trust. Examples abound: survey platforms and social media for recruitment, Gmail and Outlook for scheduling interviews, audio and video conferencing platforms for interviews, and platforms for compensation, not to mention a growing assortment of tools for data analysis that use cloud-based and/or AI features. How can researchers do right by participants, and themselves, in such shifting digital contexts?
In this presentation, we explore a range of quandaries revolving primarily around privacy and trust we encountered in conducting our respective qualitative projects: one on data collection and surveillance on U.S. college campuses, the other on how cases of identity theft get resolved. These projects set out to address questions about privacy and surveillance in the operation of systems and the lives of participants, but quickly became autoethnographic from a methodological standpoint. We are keen to explore how qualitative researchers can respond to these questions by cultivating mindsets, commitments, and modes of engagement rather than static rules and standards, particularly given what we perceive as insufficient or misguided advice from institutional review boards amidst rapid technological change. This presentation begins to address this imperative by highlighting our own reflexive approaches, incorporating how STS and other fields have turned to principles of justice in practice. It also problematizes the distinction between online and offline research, demonstrating how even seemingly non-digital studies implicate crucial questions about the role of digital platforms in qualitative research.
Maryam Tatari (European New School of Digital Studies, Europa Universität Viadrina)
Long abstract:
This paper is not about COVID-19. However, its reflexive exploration evolved around how traditional ethnographical work to study public values' embodiment in Germany's Public Service Media Online Media Libraries - the so-called ARD Audiothek and Mediathek - had to transform because of it. As the continuing COVID-19 lock-down policies in Germany from 2020 to 2022 normalized "working from home," access to the spaces of ethnography and observation for some researchers became limited. However, those spaces transferred to a few new digital spaces - zoom calls, chats, and other means of digitally crafted data - and focused more on text-based data and discourse analysis. Furthermore, friction and tensions continuously take place from the first moments of contacting a possible expert interview partner or collecting a document to moments of tweaking and tailoring the data. Relationships were shaped and shaken because of the new familiarities and unfamiliarities with the digital and physical fields.
This paper follows the researcher in shaping and (re)configuring her relationship with the digital fieldwork and tries to shed light on some data and practice methodological tensions. It mainly focuses on the digital fieldwork configured around planning and conducting interviews, early tensions between the researcher, the field, and the subject, selectivity issues, and deciding on a more heuristically exploratory "pseudo-computational" approach to trace tensions and narratives.
Tzipy Lazar-Shoef (Bar Ilan University)
Long abstract:
The digital age offers new opportunities and challenges to apply an STS perspective, described as 'diving in the magma' of collective life (Venturini, 2010). While vast digital resources enable researchers to examine thousands of archival and bibliometric materials, they also require experimenting with diverse practices to collect, organize, and analyze this data. However, 'diving' in this ocean of data does not necessarily entail 'drowning.' This talk intends to illustrate one potential approach to navigating it effectively.
During this presentation, I will openly and critically share a methodography (Lippert and Mewes, 2021) of a six-year mixed-methods study that explored how and why the obstetrics community has collectively forgotten the practice of vaginal breech delivery in favor of C-sections (Lazar-Shoef et al., forthcoming). This study, besides being exploratory and abductive, comprised three phases of analysis, each addressing unique questions, challenges, methods, and units of analysis, thereby enhancing its focus and depth.
The first phase – 'exploration' - involved preliminary inquiries into collective forgetting and the specific case of vaginal breech births. This included interviews and qualitative analyses of professional literature and guidelines. In the second phase –'bird's eye'– several quantitative and computational methods were combined (e.g., network and keyness analyses) to focus the investigation period, map relevant professional discourses, and identify unusual or interesting findings. This was followed by in-depth qualitative examinations of a focused corpus.
Sylvia Irene Lysgård (Oslo Metropolitan University)
Short abstract:
Understanding methods as performative, it matters greatly how we obtain information about that which we study. This paper aims to be concise on the kind of engagement with the digital, proposing to see the collecting and analyzing of heterogeneous online material as a form of “digital excavation”.
Long abstract:
This paper takes a reflexive stance, pondering upon what it means to do digital fieldwork in a world where data can be found everywhere and all the time, meaning that all kinds of material are published online in a continuous stream, thus quite available to interested researchers – but in amounts often overwhelming to sort out and make use of.
In my research on the Canadian oil sands, engaging with the arguments of actors involved in (and the controversies surrounding) this difficult oil production, I worked with official, public sources only, accessing these exclusively through online engagement. Having assembled very diverse material – from corporate reports, governmental white papers, juridical documents, blogs and media articles to visual imagery and technical animations – I propose my way of working with material encountered online as a form of “digital excavation”. Rather than seeing this as a way of literally unearthing artifacts, I am interested in the way researchers can alternate between collecting material, (pre)analyze these and then go back online to investigate further and dig deeper into certain matters and concerns, inspired by the findings made in previous online encounters. What then stands out, is that this digital excavation might contribute to a kind of montaging of the data that is enabled and effectuated by the very fact that the material was found online in the first place.
Can this be understood as a kind of relevance-making researchers perform, a way of snowballing material that might expand our understanding of ‘the digital’?