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’
Ask yourself two questions:
What about this research topic is spatial?
Where can you position yourself as participant-observer? (logistics)

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

5. 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

6. 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)

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, Virtual Ethnography]
Silverstone, Roger (yr??) Consuming Technologies. Article, “Information and Communication Technologies and the Moral Economy of the Household”
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
Logistics: negotiating access at multiple sites? Cost? Compromising epth of involvement?
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. 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

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?
Method and data:
participant-observation
leisure sites (Granada Studios Tour)
protest sites
interviews
media clippings about the protest

13. 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 conclude the research

14. For Tuesday
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.