Researching the digital: virtual ethnography and new learning spaces.

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Researching the digital virtual ethnography and
new learning spaces.

• Ray Land University of Strathclyde
• Siân Bayne University of Edinburgh
• Akiko Hemmi University of Edinburgh

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• If you're not on MySpace, you don't exist
• the collectivity fad
• Digital maoism (Lanier)
• the hive mind (Kelly)

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site

• These spaces offer quite different social
  textures and their mediated and inter-mediated
  nature draws into question the traditional
  ethnographic notion of site.
• Is fieldwork in virtual spaces to be considered
  multi-sited or is it perhaps better considered
  as a-sited?

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• media both mediate and are mediated these spaces
  are also both performed and performative
• Virtual ethnographies are often disparaged for
  their use of fleeting, ephemeral data, considered
  insufficient as proof.
• the complexity, fluidity, multimodality and
  palimpsest-like nature of digital data is
  undoubtedly daunting. How can virtual ethnography
  be conducted in a seemingly fractal landscape
  such as that of cyberspace?
• How does one study something which is happening
  everywhere, all over the world, all of the time,
  taking place in different places, is partially
  linked, and is undergoing constant
  transformation, revision, amendment, extension
  and amplification?
• Where is the phenomenon? (Jensen 2006)

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How do we do ethnography when we might not be on
the same continent as our subject, when our
subjects can be male or female at a whim, when
one email personality may be more than one person
sharing an account, or vice-versa, when a subject
can delete himself from a community with the
simple press of a switch, when some participants
in an online chat might be computer programs?
(Mason 1999 p.62)

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• 1 is virtual ethnography just bad ethnography?
• You cant do ethnography online. Ethnography
• requires having a sense of an in-life
  culture.
• van der Veer (2006)
• 2 does virtual ethnography comprise a different
  set of techniques from a mainstream ethnography
  and involve revisiting some of the paradigms and
  practices of ordinary ethnography?

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text stability individual private
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image mutability collective public
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These sections of the web break away from the
page metaphor. Rather than following the notion
of the web as book, they are predicated on
microcontent. Blogs are about posts, not pages.
Wikis are streams of conversation, revision,
amendment, and truncation. Alexander, 2006
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institutional control

• textual instability as a reflection of
  instability in the universitys idea of itself
  (Barnett)
• media implicated in the universitys inability to
  claim universality in its pursuit of Truth

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• supercomplexity
• we now live in a world of radical contestation
  and challengeability, a world of uncertainty and
  unpredictability. In such a world, all such
  notionsas truth, fairness, accessibility and
  knowledgecome in for scrutiny. In such a process
  of continuing reflexivity, fundamental concepts
  do not dissolve but, on the contrary, become
  systematically elaborated. In this process of
  infinite elaboration, concepts are broken open
  and subjected to multiple interpretations and
  these interpretations may, and often do,
  conflict. As a result, we no longer have stable
  ways even of describing the world that we are in
  the world becomes multiple worlds. (Barnett 2005
  p.789)

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• open text loss of closure and fixity of printed
  page a shift in epistemology
• shift in medium implies shift in reading mode,
  from literacy to multiliteracy, technoliteracy,
  multimodality

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truth, veracity and the verifiable

• process over artefact
• consensus over authority
• exploration over argument
• open text / challenge of no completion
• permanent state of new ideas /emergence
• access over possession
• public/private continuum
• networked knowledge
• speed of transmission
• mutability / volatility/ instability
• troublesome knowledge

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• rise of digital information technologies located
  firmly within the neo-liberal ideology of
  globalisation, and seen as caught inexorably
  within a logic of fast time, increasing
  acceleration and exponential growth of
  information.

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Drive-by research? Issues of method

• sheer volume of data
• temptation to just to save everything that is
  available
• restricting observation to main discussion fora
  or collaborative sites is ethnographic equivalent
  of observing only public social spaces
• not uncommon for up to 90 of responses to be
  generated by less than 10 of the membership
• danger of overload wih online interviews

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Multimodality representing the digital
digitally.

• hypermedia ethnography might deploy digital media
  in all
• phases of research
• from literature searching and tagging,
• observing of and participating with research
  subjects,
• recording the data
• analysing it through computer-aided qualitative
  data analysis software (CAQDAS)
• digital representation

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• In this way dissemination ceases to be the
  production of static texts or websites but
  becomes a creative way of encouraging colleagues
  to engage with you.

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The ethics of virtual ethnography

• issues of secrecy and identity, confidentiality,
  anonymity, presence, deception and access are
  clearly crucial to the virtual.
• by posting a message to an online forum is there
  is an implied licence to read or even archive the
  information that the message contains?
• if just one respondent declines to give consent
  are we denied access to the entire forum?
• does conducting research via the internet pose
  any more ethical dilemmas than when conducting
  research by more traditional means?

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issues

• interaction in cyberspace is not just textual
  exchange.
• need to resist the design of virtual
  ethnography methodologies. Each project creates
  its own methodology.
• a number of important categories (body, gender,
  race, etc) and inequalities are probably
  reproduced in cyberspace.
• virtual worlds are currently largely evaluated in
  terms of their ability to add value to offline
  spheres

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Second Life
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• virtual ethnography can provide fuel for the
  methodological imagination and remain a source
  of both hope and anxiety. (Hine 2005 pp.2-3).

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• ray.land_at_strath.ac.uk