Paper short abstract:

Social media platforms offer new opportunities for the study of everyday life. At the same time, digital traces on social media are distinctly quali-quantiative, allowing us to think about simultaneously mapping interactions while exploring their substance in depth.

Paper long abstract:

Efforts to systematically survey everyday life may have fallen from favour in european ethnology, but the ambitions of the historical geographical paradigm resonate strongly in contemporary mappings of online media practices. While cartographically inclined ethnologists may consider this an opportunity to dust off old techniques and explore new empirical opportunities, it is certainly also the case that digital methods could benefit from an ethnological perspective (Munk & Jensen 2014). While digital 'issue mapping' (Marres 2015) or 'controversy mapping' (Venturini 2010) in STS tends to focus on explicit political discourse or arguments, uttered in relation to topical affairs on social media for example, the mundane everyday interactions which are also a defining hallmark of such media platforms receive less attention. Drawing on my experiences from several recent projects at the intersection between ethnology and digital methods I discuss what ethnocartography might accomplish in social media settings. A key problem is the status and role of platforms and their algorithms. The both technically and politically charged media environments in which traces of the 'everyday' are 'left' by the users must thus be critically scrutinised and mapped as part of the analysis.