Making the case for ethnography as a critical dimension in media and technology studies

Опубликовано 17 августа 2016, 3:46

Drawing on examples from my past and current research, I will use this talk to both respond to recent provocations (boyd and Crawford, 2011) about the role of ΓÇ£big dataΓÇ¥ in human communication research and technology studies and outline the value of anthropology, as a particular kind of ΓÇ£big data,ΓÇ¥ that warrants more attention. I will walk through what I see as the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of ΓÇ£big dataΓÇ¥ to argue for attending to different kinds of data (from the statistically to the ethnographically significant), more collaborative approaches to how we arrive at what we (think we) know, and critical analysis of the cultural assumptions embedded in the data we collect. By moving from the ΓÇ£snapshotΓÇ¥ of quantitative work to the ΓÇ£time-lapse photographyΓÇ¥ of ethnography, I hope to persuade you that researchers, who aspire to build technologies for human communication, must imagine ΓÇ£big dataΓÇ¥ as an on-going process of modeling, triangulation, and critique. In short, we must be as invested in pushing open new terrain for questions as we are in finding answers about what technologies mean to people in their everyday lives.