How can Qualitative Internet Researchers Define the Boundaries of their projects? Christine Hine 2009
This chapter is about choices: Where do you begin and which avenues do you pursue? If there is a fork in the road, do you take left or right or both?
I think it is also about modern attitudes of researchers towards old dogmatic views of how ethnographies should be conducted. Some of the issues seem to me as a newcomer completely obvious and unnecessary to even mention – I struggle to understand why something so obvious needs to be said in a hundred different ways. Then I realized it is probably because I am oblivious of the set rules and regulations that prevailed in research before new technologies took over. Perhaps it needs to be said in different ways and by different people before it can be accepted by the general research community. Lyall Watson struggled for years to change attitudes of a community of biologists who believed the boundaries of what science is cannot be moved.
Hine uses her own experience as ethnographer working in the broad area of sociology of science and technology to demonstrate her approach. So her starting point sociology of science and technology as well as her interest in the status of ethnography as methid of understanding contemporary societ.
She feels methodological choices has an essential link to theory. Each theoretical perspective has an angle on what is interesting in social situations and how to study them. You know where to start and when to stop when you insure that the research questions are coherently addressed and adapted to the cultural landscape that emerges. Theories give us ways of viewing the world that can shape ideas about how to go about empirical research.
Two ways in which the sensibilities of science and technology shape her approach to the internet:
1. Its concern with the development of technologies as a social process. Science and technology studies suggest that we should look for the social dynamics at the heart of new technologies. (whether a new technology is effective or marketable)
2. Its approach to the contingency and variability of technologies in use. Technologies have an interpretative flexibility – different social groups view them differently
Technology development and technology appropriation are both well suited to ethnographic approaches.
Problem in defining appropriate field sites: It is not always possible to identify in advance where the relevant social dynamics for understanding a particular technology are going on. Try to trace the histories and connections and social groups identified around the technology while remaining ambivalent about the identity of the object being studied. (Zimbabwe bush pump – de Laet and Mol) Whether it is working successfully is a very contextual judgement. Suspend judgement on forms of boundaries and instead engage with situations at hand. (Idea of technologies with multiple identities.)
She refers to Law’s book “After Method” – about the inherently messy and complex world and you cannot superimpose methodological stances upon it. The researcher should be a constructor of reality and not hide behind portrayals of method as mere technique.
Complex societies and ethnography
Ethnography is thought of as the most open of research approaches which adapts itself to the situation it finds.
Yet, Ulf Hannertz suggests that ethnography, narrowly construed as the study of a particular bounded field site, does an injustice to cultural complexity. But who construes it as a particular bounded field site?
Hine also says that concerns about ethnography as an appropriate medium to address cultural complexity and multi-sited cultural formations have been prominent in recent years.
Buroway and colleagues “redefine” the work of ethnography as “to study others in their space and time”. Thus ethnography becomes increasingly construed as the exploration and description of the practices of locating, siting, connecting and bounding through which culture is constituted.
Hine dissociates herself from the project of anthropology – she does not share a commitment to the overall disciplinary project of it although her writing is tied to a particular project of anthropology.
Societies are complex: media-saturated lives, connected across the globe by travel and migration and telephone and internet communications.
New terminology is needed: Appandurai talks about “scapes”: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes.
Multi-sited ethnography and the internet
Markham argues that the internet can be seen as tool, place and way of being and these different aspects offer different methodological choices. Don’t be restricted methodologically by notions of internet as place.
Examples of innovative studies that illustrate different ways of starting to design a study that engages with the internet:
Nicola Green:
Conducted a multi-sited ethnography of a virtual technology. She builds an approach based on feminist poststructuralism and science and technology studies to argue that virtual reality technologies are best studied through a flexible approach that follows people and objects and the stories about them. She even became involved in sites where virtual reality technologies are produced, using them herself and focusing on workers who make virtual reality systems available for members of the public to use. She shows that virtual reality requires various forms of social investment to be realized as a practical achievement.
T.L. Taylor:
Focuses her attention on virtual worlds and explores some of the challenges that this form of research involves. Ethnographers in virtual fields have to consider how active to be in relation to the particular technologies that they study.
Max Forte
Ethnographic study of resurgence in aboriginal identity in the Caribbean. He volunteerd to develop websites explaining their cause. He deepened his engagement with fieldwork and created a field through his interactions with web site visitors. This allows him to understand the patterns and processes of cultural practice that bring together individuals into online groups of producers, promoters and information consumers.
Philip Howard
Uses social network analysis of online data and ethnography to get to the heart of new organizational dynamics revolving around digital technologies
Anne Beaulieu
Uses hyperlinks as a way of moving around a field site and reflects upon how hyperlinks come to be created and used. Online traces then provide one way of moving around a filed site.
Nina Wakeford and Katrina Jungnickel:
Ethnographic study on the role of place in the consumption of digital information using a bus journey to provide the spatial parameters of the study and to guide their engagement with the urban environment. Their accompanying website and blog interweave technology to expand the boundaries of the ethnography and use place-based ethnography to critically engage with the ideas of mobility, ubiquity and virtuality that permeate the technology.
Hine feels all these studies demonstrate that the key to their insight is immersion, not necessarily by being in a particular place, but by engaging in relevant practices wherever they might be found.
Studying E-science ethnographically
Hine uses the example of the biological discipline of systematics or taxonomy and specifically the ways in which it has in recent years come to see the internet as suitable place to conduct its activities.
Rationale for conducting this study: the desire to contribute to the ongoing interest in e-science and cyberinfrastructure – it hopes to make science more efficient and enable it to address larger and more complex questions.
She identified sites to visit and people to interview by a mixture of sources, on- and offline.
She first explored a report on the state of systematic in Britain, in the context of commitments made under the Convention of Biological Diversity – it provided data on the way that expectations about the role of digital technology were embedded into the practices of systematics. The internet was presented as the hope and destiny of systematic. This report provided her with a “map” of the field via the individuals and institutions that gave evidence. – websites to visit, institutions to explore, individuals to approach for interviews.
Her key guiding principal was to ask herself why activities might be happening and what kind of sense they made to those involved.
Key words: read, interview, lurk, question, link, search.
She had a model of Heath et al’s study of the networked and interlinking locations in which scientific work is done. The process she undertook was to co-construct the tool and the job.
She found that looking at existing databases that institutions held detailing their specimen holdings, helped her to later make sense of the distributed internet databases. Taxonomy works with very long time horizons and resources need to be retained indefinitely for future use. The provision of online databases is in line with a culture that expects specimens themselves to be maintained. Looking at the internet was therefore not the most useful way of bounding the study.
She found an online forum that offered access to debates around the role and construction of online databases and acted as a venue for database providers to promote their work. She introduced herself to the group owner and asked questions to the participants. The online group provided a venue for reflection.
The study also moved to an engagement with material culture. She visited museums, botanical gardens, dried fungi, insects in drawers etc. By doing this she was able to understand more aspects of unline resources. She found out about practices of loaning, how objects are stored and ordered to be useful for systematic. The material culture turned out to be important to make sense of the virtual culture.
There are various ways to grasp the connections among the virtual entities:
Ways to map cyberspace (Dodge and Kitchin)
Web sphere analysis for archiving and exploring (Schneider and Foot)
Exploration and analysis of networks that arise in hyperlinks between sites related to a topic - spatiality of the web( Rogers and Marres)
Hine used the following: Touchgraph Googel Browser (http://www.touchgraph.com/) offers visualizations of site networks using the google facility to track down related sites. She used these representations as tools for exploration rather than static figures. She also used it to check that she did not miss key players. There is a strong autobiographical element to the research she undertook – research conducted many years earlier as part of doctoral research which gave her networks, starting points and understanding of technical issues (she did botany as undergraduate).
So eventually this study combined:
Face-to-face interviews, visits to physical sites, autobiographical experiences, historical documents, websites, searches and surfing, participation in online groups, structured analyses of messages, email interactions and dynamic visualizations of web-based networks.
Conclusion: The issues she explores relate to qualitative methods more broadly. It is difficult to make an absolute distinction between ethnography and other forms of social research – the boundaries are unclear.
Sometimes we are required to cross between online and offline. Social phenomena are uniquely defined by online and offline sites.
In this chapter she talks about the construction of project boundaries as a social process – it is linked to ethnography as an adaptive methodological approach. The decision of where to start and where to stop is an intrinsic part of the ethnographer’s relationship to the field. A set of field work boundaries is the outcome of the project, not the precursor. It is also bounded by what the researcher can practically achieve.
Lori Kendall’s response
Two of her insights are particularly important:
1. Project boundaries might not be set within a particular location as field sites have sometimes traditionally been conceived. Internet research is a rich arena for thinking about how contemporary culture is constituted. (Immersion, starting point)
2. The definitions of the research objects are emergent rather than predeterminded – it cannot be decided in advance. The meaning of particular technologies varies within particular cultural concepts.
3. Her primary focus is on “spatial” boundaries. Her focus is also on theory and the connection between theory and methodological choices including boundary decisions.
Lori considers 3 different kinds of boundaries and three different spheres of influence on boundary choices.
She calls the 3 boundaries: spatial, temporal and relational.
The 3 spheres of influence: analytical, ethical and personal.
Boundaries:
Spatial: where, who and what.
Temporal: Questions of time spent and issues of beginning and ending research.
Relational: Relationships between researchers and the people they study.
Spheres of Influence:
Analytical: Theoretical and analytical decisions regarding project boundaries.
Ethical: Boundary decisions made for ethical reasons.
Personal: Aspects of the researcher’s background that might influence the choice of boundaries – personal proclivities (tendencies), skills or history.
(Practical considerations constitutes a fourth sphere)
All these spheres and boundaries interact: “translucent faceted gem”
She calls Hine’s discussion “a relatively traditional way” of looking at the boundaries of research projects – primarily motivated by theoretical concerns with other issues such as ethical and practical matters mainly providing limits on what is possible.
Danah Boyd’s response:
After some foolish questions and koan responses from her professors, Danah realized that boundaries of an essay should be determined by the point being made not by the page count and when you stop learning new things without expanding the scope of your question.
She says networked technologies have completely disrupted any simple construction of a field site. Traditionally, ethnographers sought out a physical site and focused on the culture, peoples, practices and aftifacts present in a geographically bounded context.
Mobility and mediated technologies changed everything – there is no access to a hypertextual world. Geography is no longer the framework for culture – people are part of many cultures defined by tastes, worldview, language, religion, social networks and practices. Hine says not to simply reject what anthropologists say, but realize it is not the whole story.
At first with internet, architectural appeared to provide boundaries (chat rooms), but now search has continued to collapse all place-driven web contexts. Current social groups are defined through relationships. But now there is no overarching set of norms or practices instead each node reveals an entirely different set of assumptions.
Given that networked technologies complicate research – what does it mean to do ethnographic internet research?
Comment on Hine: Hine says ethnography is “an adaptive methodological approach. She reveals the diversity of approaches that researches take. She highlights the most critical feature of ethnography as a method: It is not prescriptive.
Guidelines by Danah Boyd:
1. Read other ethnographies
2. Begin by focusing on a culture (what defines the culture, practices, identities, social groups, social dynamics. Be bound by culture, not by questions. Researchers must be prepared for observations and data to reveal new questions.
3. Get into the field, hang out, observe, document, question, analyze. Build rapport, participate.
4. Never get too comfortable. Be reflexive of your own biases. Question your own questioning.
5. Understand that boundary construction is a social process.(Hine: “working across, exploring connections, making tentative forays
6. Understand that making meaning is an interpretative process. The goal of ethnography is to make meaning of culture.
Four key architectural properties of mediated sociality to keep in mind:
Persistence, searchability, replicability and invisible audiences.
Internet ethnology is not about the technology, it is about the people, their practices and the cultures they form.
