Digitality and Ethnography

An introduction to methods for more-than-digital fields

Abstract

The fields of ethnographic research and scientific research practice itself are hardly imaginable without digital processes and technologies. Ethnographers encounter research partners on the Internet, use their chat messages and forum posts as research material, and follow actors in social media. They also sit next to them while they program, or walk with them through data-saturated urban spaces. In the introduction to our volume Doing Ethnography in Digital Fields, we ask what this increasing normality and ubiquity of the digital means for the epistemic practice of ethnography. We argue that even in doing ethnography of and in more-than-digital fields and with the use of computational methods, the core principles of ethnographic research remain the same: a fundamental flexibility and adaptability to the research object, a continuous reflection on the research decisions made, and a sensitivity to the factors that shape and structure both the research and the fields under study. The methodological consequences and challenges that can arise from this and how they can be met are shown by the contributions in this volume, which we present in this introduction.