Virtual Ethnography
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Virtual ethnography is a new development in the field of Ethnography. It extends the traditional notions of field and ethnographic study from the observation of co-located, face-to-face interactions, to physically distributed, technologically mediated interactions in virtual networks and virtual communities. In doing so it challenges the traditional notion of a field site as a localised space and moves it into the virtual world of physically distributed interactions. [link]
Virtual ethnography attempts to maintain the values of traditional ethnography through providing a "thick" description through the "immersion" of the researcher in the lives of their subjects. This focus on the subject makes virtual ethnography quite distinct from Web usage mining or social network analysis, although it may use similar techniques to identify or map networks.
The key question for virtual ethnography researcher is "how can ethnography be pursued in technologically mediated settings"? Researchers have attempted to create virtual counterparts for many of the basic ethnographic concepts but whether they can appropriately be applied to technologically mediated interaction is still open (Howard, 2003). For example, if a researcher simply reads some emails or participates in chatrooms, does this represent an ethnography: can the researcher still be said to have immersed themselves in the life of the community?
See also
References
- Howard, P. (2003) Network ethnography and the hypermedia organization: new organizations, new media, new methods, New Media & Society, Vol 4(4), pp 551-575
External links
- [Combining ethnographic and clickstream data to identify user Web browsing strategies] Paper by Lillian Clark, I-Hsien Ting, Chris Kimble, Peter Wright, Daniel Kudenko in Information Research, Vol. 11 No. 2, January 2006
- [Virtual Ethnography: Interactive Interviewing Online as Method] Paper by Susan Crichton and Shelley Kinash in Canadian Journal of learning and Technology, Volume 29(2) Spring, 2003
- [The Academic Robotics Community in the UK: Web based data construction and analysis of a distributed community of practice] Working Paper by Mark Tomlinson from The Danish Research Unit for Industrial Dynamics
- [Virtual Ethnography] Paper by Christine Hine from Internet Research for Information and Social Scientists (IRISS) conference 1998
Further Reading
Markham, A. N. (1998) Life Online: Researching Real Experience in Virtual Space (AltaMira Press)
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