1. Constructing the Field Site (Multi-Sited and Virtual Ethnography)
INFO 272. Qualitative Research Methods
Constructing the Field Site (Multi-Sited and Virtual Ethnography)

2. Outline The Field Site Challenges to the Early Model
Multi-Sited Ethnography
Virtual Ethnography
Examples

3. Selecting a ‘Field Site’
Where can you position yourself as participant-observer? (logistics)
What about the research topic is spatial?

4. Ethnography ala Malinowski 1922-1960s
Spatial Aspects of Field Work:
Field sites are discovered
One distinct, bounded site
the site = focus of ‘whole culture’
Often possible to totally enumerate the population

5. Challenges: ambiguous spatial terrain
cyberspace
borderlands and transnational communities
global institutions (the UN)
the mass media
non-places (airports) [Augé]
Augé, Marc (1995) ‘Non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity’ – discusses places of transience (motorway, airport, supermarket)

6. Challenges: urban settings
complex, heterogeneous, overlapping cultures [Hannerz]
“the challenge of foregrounding”
Hannerz, Ulf (1992). Cultural Complexity: studies in the social organization of meaning
Anderson, Elijah (2003). A Place on the Corner

7. Challenges: media and technology
‘double articulation’ [Silverstone] -- one can study the television (as a consumed object, it’s place in the home, it’s shape/size/style) and the television program (as window into and education about contemporary culture)
Internet can been studied as both culture and as cultural artifact [Hine]
Silverstone, Roger (yr??) Consuming Technologies.
Hine, Christine. (2000) Virtual Ethnography

8. Approaches: Multi-Sited Ethnography
studying the local as embedded in the global [Marcus and Fischer]
studying the global system itself [Marcus]
fieldsites need not be static and bounded
“follow the object” “follow the people” “follow the metaphor” to create coherence
Marcus, George and Michael Fischer (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
Marcus, George (1998) Ethnography Through Thick and Thin

9. Approaches: Virtual Ethnography
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) research vs. Online Ethnographers
Cyberspace – “profoundly anti-spatial…You cannot say where it is or describe its memorable shape and proportions…But you can find things in it without knowing where they are” [Mitchell 1996]
Questioning the nature of ‘dwelling’ and ‘participation’

10. Approaches: Online + Offline
Can you study someone online without studying them offline? (questions of authenticity)
Is cyberspace a bounded and detached space?

11. 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?

12. Couldry’s strategy for studying Media Rituals
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

13. Couldry’s strategy for studying Media Rituals
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

14. Turkle studies ‘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

15. Turkle studies ‘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

16. Ethnography Without Borders
The field site is constructed (not discovered)
studying a ‘part’ of the whole
studying multiple sites
studying movement

17. The Fieldsite as a Network
Before: Ask yourself – where is the social process carried out? where is it especially visible? where is it contested?
To Start: Seeking entry-points (not sites)
Follow people, things, themes to other sites (iterative approach)
To Stop: With meaning saturation re-situate yourself or quit

18. For Thursday
Please send me your fieldnotes so I can post them on the website
Look over your classmates field notes – especially those on the same team.