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Doing Digital Ethnography in collaboration with Ethnographic Café

The significance of the digital world and online technologies have come into focus in the wake of the pandemic.  As they transform many facets of social life—work, play, finance, relationships—online spaces also invite a rethinking of social science methodologies and theories.  This panel examines the craft of digital ethnography, or participant observation of online social spaces.  We consider the promises and challenges of fieldwork in online social life, hybrid combinations of data in-real-life and online, and the future and limitations of participant observation in an increasingly digitized world.   

Moderated by Melissa Aronczyk (Rutgers University); co-founder of Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group

Participants 

Melissa Aronczyk is Associate Professor of Media Studies in the School of Communication & Information at Rutgers University. She is interested in how ideas, things and practices become valuable; and the technologies that render them that way. Her latest book is A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of Environmentalism (co-authored with Maria I. Espinoza), with Oxford University Press, a critical look at the intertwined history of environmental inaction in the United States and the rise of the PR industry in the twentieth century. 

Sophie Bishop, is a Lecturer in Cultural and Creative Industries at the Management School of Sheffield University. 

Bishop researches promotional culture and creative work on platforms. A feminist scholar, she examines the labor of beauty and fashion influencers, as well as algorithms as they are understood by users. She has published in Social Media + Society, New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies and more. She is currently the Specialist Advisor on the UK’s Parliamentary Inquiry into Influencer Culture. 

André Brock, Associate Professor of Black Digital Studies in the Department of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Institute of Technology 

Trained in Library and Information Sciences, Brock is a leading scholar of race and social media with groundbreaking work on Black Twitter.  His research in digital humanities and media studies documents racial representations online.  His book, Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020, NYU Press) received the 2021 Nancy Baym Book Award in Internet Studies, among other recognitions.

Jeff Lane, Associate Professor of Communication at Rutgers University

Lane studies how living in poor neighborhoods is being transformed via social media. His work combines digital and in-person ethnography to rethink sociological notions of neighborhood crime, violence, policing, and gentrification. His book, The Digital Street (Oxford University Press, 2019), has received awards from the American Sociological Association and Association of Internet Researchers.

Nick Seaver, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Tufts University

Seaver is an anthropologist at Tufts, where he also teaches in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society. His ethnographic research on the developers of algorithmic music recommendation has appeared in Cultural Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Big Data & Society. He is co-editor of Towards an Anthropology of Data (2021) and author of the forthcoming Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation. His current research explores the use of attention as a value and virtue in machine learning worlds.