Constructing the Field Site (Multi-Sited and Virtual Ethnography)

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Constructing the Field Site (Multi-Sited and
Virtual Ethnography)

• INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods

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Outline

• The Field Site
• Challenges to the Early Model
• Multi-Sited Ethnography
• Virtual Ethnography
• Examples

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Selecting a Field Site

• Where can you position yourself as
  participant-observer? (logistics)
• What about the research topic is spatial?

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Ethnography ala Malinowski 1922-1960s

• Spatial Aspects of Field Work
• Field sites are discovered
• One distinct, bounded site
• the site focus of whole culture
• total enumeration of the population

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Challenges ambiguous spatial terrain

• cyberspace
• borderlands and transnational communities
• global institutions (the UN)
• the mass media
• non-places (airports) Auge

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Challenges urban settings

• complex, heterogeneous, overlapping cultures
  Hannerz
• the challenge of foregrounding

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Challenges media and technology

• double articulation Silverstone one can study
  the television (as a consumed object, its place
  in the home, its shape/size/style) and the
  television program
• Internet can been studied as both culture and as
  cultural artifact Hine

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Approaches Multi-Sited Ethnography

• studying the local as embedded in the global
  Marcus and Fischer
• studying the global system itself Marcus
• fieldsite need not be static and bounded
• follow the object follow the people follow
  the metaphor to create coherence

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Approaches Virtual Ethnography

• CMC vs. Online Ethnographers
• Cyberspace profoundly anti-spatialYou cannot
  say where it is or describe its memorable shape
  and proportionsBut you can find things in it
  without knowing where they are Mitchell 1996
• Questioning the nature of dwelling and
  participation

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Approaches Online Offline

• Can you study someone online without studying
  them offline? (authenticity)
• Theories of cyberculture as detached and
  self-contained

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Studying a Part of the Whole

• Selecting an entry point
• How does the part relate to the whole?
• What position do you take within the whole and
  how do you justify that position?

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Couldry passing ethnographies

• questions
• what is the role of media in the legitimation of
  wider power structures and inequalities?
• how are media institutions and media people
  thought about? what are our beliefs about media
  power and how do they contribute to the
  legitimation of that power?

• what position do you take within the whole and
  why?
• moments where the process of legitimating media
  power was made explicit, visible
• exceptional sites

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Couldry passing ethnographies

• questions
• what is the role of media in the legitimation of
  wider power structures and inequalities?
• how are media institutions and media people
  thought about? what are our beliefs about media
  power and how do they contribute to the
  legitimation of that power?

• method
• participant-observation
• leisure sites (Granada Studios Tour)
• protest sites
• interviews
• media clippings about the protest

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Turkle Life on the screen

• Questions
• how has the computer shaped our ways of thinking
  and feeling?
• how does a nascent culture of simulation
  affect our ideas about mind, body, self and
  machine?
• how is the way we create and experience identity
  shifting?

• What position do you take within the whole and
  why
• the culture of simulation as part of a larger
  cultural context
• the eroding of boundaries between real and
  virtual

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Turkle Life on the screen

• Questions
• how has the computer shaped our ways of thinking
  and feeling?
• how does a nascent culture of simulation
  affect our ideas about mind, body, self and
  machine?
• how is the way we create and experience identity
  shifting?

• method
• ethnographic component
• participation in a virtual world
• clinical component
• offline, in-person interviews with participants

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Ethnography without borders

• The field site is constructed (not discovered)
• studying a part of the whole
• studying multiple sites
• studying movement

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In Conclusion

1. Before Ask yourself where is the social
   process carried out? where is it especially
   visible? where is it contested?
2. To Start Seeking entry-points (not sites)
3. Follow people, things, themes to other sites
   (iterative approach)
4. To Stop With meaning saturation re-situate
   yourself or quit

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Thursday

1. No more fieldwork
2. Start preparing your fieldnotes to submit to me
   (due next Thursday)
3. Get some large notecards and make up 20 cards
   with notes (hone in on engagements with
   technology in public)