FF Network 53 (original) (raw)
Ethnography in the Digital Age
An Interdisciplinary, Searchable, and Linkable Resource, 2015
This essay explores the ways in which ethnography, both as a methodology and a product of research, has adapted to the rapid growth of digital technology and the new venues for research that it has spawned. On the one hand, digital technology affords social scientists new means of recording, storing, and analyzing data. On the other hand, digital media have been responsible for the creation of new venues for research, mostly on the Internet in the form of websites, blogs, social networks, and multiplayer online games. As a methodology, ethnography, with its beginnings in the anthropological study of non-Western societies, has proved to be highly adaptable to the task of making sense of, and giving meaning to, computer-mediated communications in its various forms. This has led to its adoption in the study of online sites by researchers from a number of different disciplines attempting to come to grips with the cultural nuances of digitally formed communities. Ethical problems posed by more powerful forms of surveillance and access to personal information are discussed. The boundaries between public and private domains have become increasingly blurred, resulting in complex issues relating to informed consent. As a product, digital ethnographies allow for nonlineal, hyperlinked presentations that permit new forms of engagement between authors and readers not afforded by traditional published monographs.
Literatura Ludowa, 2022
, a writer, a poet and a musician. Ceallaigh's research interests include animal rights activism as a public performance of ethical belief, which is the topic of her dissertation, and creative applications of folkloristic scholarship for storytellers. Her Folklore & Fiction podcast, "where folklore scholarship meets storytelling craft", launched in 2021. keywords: podcasting; folklore; contemporary folklore; oral culture; aural culture ak: What is Folklore & Fiction about? cm: The purpose of the podcast originally was, and continues to be, bringing good folklore scholarship to people who are writers, storytellers and creators of various kinds. I thought this would be a really good opportunity to explain, as a folklorist, what a myth is, what a legend is, what a tall tale is, what a fairy tale is. Give it some folkloristic context, talk about what scholars have had to say. There is plenty of useful research for writers in narrative scholarship. I was a writer first and then a scholar: when I started school in 2016, I had already been writing and publishing for about 14 years, and I had put aside my writing career and gone back to school for my doctorate. So I wanted to help creators to write myths that sound like myths, legends that sound like legends. These old patterns resonate with us because we have heard them over and over again already in various versions. I believe as a writer that taking these patterns, the bones of a story, and putting them into something new, perhaps very different or alien, can make your writing more approachable for readers.
2017
Digital ethnography, an emerging field in ethnography poses questions about the communicative phenomena taking place in a technologically mediated world. Digitized spaces today are where communities of all kinds exist. Experiences of day-to-day realities take place in digitally connected spaces and the storied lives of communities are told through the online sphere. These spaces are where identities are negotiated, cultural practices enacted, and social phenomena of various kinds are manifested, a worthy area for interpretation for ethnographers interested in the tradition of story-telling to understand the social world. The entry discusses digital ethnography and what the process entails, the emergence of the method of inquiry, and the various debates that currently exist regarding the value of conducting ethnography in online spaces. It presents the various issues and contentions digital ethnographers grapple with when identifying their field site for interpretation, and considers various perspectives on the nature of conducting digital ethnography.
Contemporary Folklore, Internet and Communities at the beginning of the 21st Century
2010
Estonian folklorists first became interested in folklore online and archiving that material in the period 1996–2002. On the one hand, internet studies were a logical continuation of working with bringing folklore materials online, on the other hand these people were personally interested in following the fast onslaught of internet in Estonia. In the late 1990s, many of the researchers as well as assistants working in the department of folkloristics were actively creators of web interfaces for publishing, learning and teaching folklore (cf Kõiva 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005; Kõiva & Vesik 2002, 2005; Kõiva & Kuperjanov & Vesik 2007). They were aware of what was happening in the web in Estonia. Some of us belonged to an internet community, participated in a chatroom, moderated or posted to a mailing list, was a recognised contributor. For some, work and personal interest coincided.1 The internet has been, from the start, the ideal fieldwork location for folklorists because of the multitude ...
It is commonly thought that ‘being there’ has been the sine qua non of anthropological research ever since Malinowski’s ‘fieldwork revolution’ in the early 20th century (Geertz 1988). Yet during World War Two, leading US-based anthropologists such as Mead, Bateson and Benedict had no choice but to study the cultures of Japan, Germany and other nations ‘at a distance’, including through media formats such as films, novels, and poetry (Mead and Metraux 2000). With the explosive growth of networked technologies in recent years, the remote study of social practices is once again on the agenda - only now with far greater media resources at our disposal than those available in the 1940s. In this chapter I reflect on my experience of researching digital politics while physically absent from ‘the field’. I argue that there is nothing inherently inferior or illegitimate about researching local issues remotely (e.g. via Twitter, live streaming, web cam, email, online archives), or indeed retroactively, especially for ethnographers with previous local experience. The main challenge is precisely how to overcome this misconception and make adequate provision for remote ethnography in our research designs and practices.
Second International Handbook of Internet Research, 2019
Internet researchers recurrently encounter kinds of online content and communicational genres that appear as trivial and mundane as they are entangled with the everyday use of new media: online jargons, emoticons, copy-pasted jokes, Internet memes and many other repertoires of digital folklore. Over the last four decades, this sort of semiotic resources and user practices have been approached from multiple angles: as forms of textual play or poaching, as examples of visual or linguistic creativity, as a material culture resulting from networked communications, as vernacular resources for identity-making, and as the folk art of new media. After revisiting the convergence of folklore studies and computer-mediated communication, this chapter presents four perspectives through which various authors have approached digital folklore: Internet folkloristics, vernacular creativity, digital folk art aesthetics, and memetics.
Relating folklore and internet: Concerns, reservations and objections
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities, 3(1): 14-19, 2021
This paper presents the Relation between Folklore and Internet, especially considering whether the latter is or should be a subject of study by folklorists or not. Many folklorists in the 20th Century had been opposed to the massive media, like television, cinema, radio, Internet and others, since such media use oral communication in a way that is opposed to face-to-face communication. In their reasoning, face-to-face oral communication constitutes a key-feature of folk culture. Some of them also thought that electronic technologies would help to replace traditional creation by the advanced consumer culture or loose folk culture, eliminating the traditional way of dealing with things or failing to fully present all the social functions of the traditional way. On the other hand, modern folklorists argue that Folklore can neither be associated solely with the culture of illiterate social groups of older times, like farmers or poor bourgeois, nor with particular older ways of communication. In this respect, Internet has become a communication tool that has replaced face-to-face communication with person-to-person one, has helped to preserve and disseminate older forms of folk culture and even create new ones. Therefore, Internet is worthy of being a proper subject of study for Folklore Science.