Ethnography for the Digital Age

Amanda Coffey, Bella Dicks, Bruce Mason, Bambo Soyinka, Cardiff University, School of Social Sciences

RMP Project page

This session will consider the challenges and opportunities of undertaking ethnography and qualitative work in the digital age. The session will be in two parts.

Firstly, there will a narrative account of the current multimedia, digital ethnographic work being undertaken by the Cardiff team. This will provide a contextual overview of the substantive and methodological project.

Secondly, there will be a discussion of the process and methodological implications of constructing a hypermedia ethnographic environment. This will be informed by our current work in progress.

Publications           Web link           Slides

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Interactive Research Methods: Research on Ethnoecological Knowledge Creation, Use and Transmission
Michael Fischer, Gary Martin, David Zeitlyn, Janet Bagg, University of Kent

RMP Project page

This will consist of two sessions of 40 minutes:

I. Knowledge in action: Methods for assessing the cultural transmission of ecological knowledge

People learn about knowledge mostly from the results of its practice. This raises a serious problem: how do people derive knowledge from their individual experiences that is similar to other people with other experience (or do they?). How does this impact research methods for learning about knowledge? With a focus on our own research we discuss problems and our approach to solving these problems using interactive methods. There will be time for discussion and comment during and following the presentation.

II. Interactive Ethnographic research - methods, methodology and software tools

We will discuss the role of interactive software in ethnographic research using examples from our research. We will specifically address methodological problems underlying software representations of methods and how we have addressed or are addressing these problems. There will be time for discussion and comment during and following the presentation.

Slides