The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography

Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, Genevieve Bell, Larissa Hjorth, Heather Horst, Anne Galloway, Genevieve Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317377771
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area.

Features include:

• a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology;
• exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations;
• consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale;
• in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives.

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Part I

DEBATING DIGITAL ETHNOGRAPHY

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1

COMPUTERS IN/AND ANTHROPOLOGY

The Poetics and Politics of Digitization

Mike Fortun, Kim Fortun, and George E. Marcus

Introduction

The Use of Computers in Anthropology (Hymes 1965) is a massive volume stemming from a 1962 Wenner-Gren symposium held in their Austrian castle. The book is rich with diverse and provocative articles detailing early experiences—experiments, even—with computers among anthropologists.¹ The collection is headed by an un-sourced quote from Claude Levi-Strauss: “. . . the fundamental requirement of anthropology,” this epigraph reads, “is that it begin with a personal relation and end with a personal experience, but . . . in between there is room for plenty of computers” (Hymes 1965, 5).

Both volume and epigraph seem worth quoting at the opening of a chapter for a companion to digital ethnography—for substantive reasons as well as more theoretical or methodological reasons. Substantively, the quote and the volume itself point to the capacious, plentiful “room” in which anthropology finds itself in the company of computers—in 1965, 2015, and any time in between and beyond. There is lots of room in anthropology—digital and otherwise—for lots of computational devices, and each of these multitudes can be put into lots of configurations. It is once again, as we will argue here, a time (1965, 2015, 2065 . . .) ripe for experimentation, when anthropologists have ample tools and ample spaces in which to work and play with them, toward multiple theoretical and practical ends. And they have ample opportunity and need to do so, we will also argue, within new forms of collaboration.

The quote and volume also reference a formal, structural, or infrastructural concern, which in turn points to an important difference between 1962 as a time of “the computer,” and the digital anthropologies of 2015 and beyond. The Levi-Strauss quote—and it is clearly a quote, with quotation marks and ellipses—is un-sourced. Was it spoken or written? When, where, to whom, in what context? That data—or more accurately, that metadata—is not provided in the 1965 volume on anthropology, computers, and the emergent field of new data, methods, and theories. A quick and easy search of the Internet in 2015, however, turns up . . . only a reference to this very 1965 volume, in an informative series on the history of computers in anthropology by Nick Seaver, written for the important, long-running blog-experiment in digital anthropology Savage Minds (2014). We learn a great deal about the long history of computers in/and anthropology there (well worth reading but which we cannot recap here), but nothing further about the Levi-Strauss utterance.

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This Levi-Strauss quote points to important differences marking the contemporary period in this history of computers in/and anthropology, as well as some enduring features. What we would today call the provenance of the Levi-Strauss quote is lost in the 1965 publication. The individual articles in that volume present fascinating accounts of early anthropological experiments with computers, in some cases complete with elaborate fold-outs of machine diagrams and programming matrices, along with finely crafted summaries of the wide-ranging and at times probably heated discussions that took place in 1962—but not actual transcripts that would allow us now, in their future, to attribute and re-consider exact phrasings, or to re-interpret the interactions, exchanges, and movements that occurred between the presentations. The socio-technical infrastructure that could make that kind of data archiving and sharing possible, and thus desirable, both for anthropological work and for anthropology itself, is only now becoming available.

So at this very different infrastructural moment in the human sciences, we can nevertheless reiterate Dell Hymes’ earlier conviction that “the computer” offers an opportunity for “heightening the quality of work” in anthropology. As it was then, it is now an opportunity that demands “increased attention” to two things. The first is “the logic and practice of quantitative and qualitative analysis,” the second “the forms of cooperation and integration needed to make our stores of data systematic, comparable, accessible to each other and to theory . . . The story of the computer in anthropology will be the story of how these two demands are met” (Hymes 1965, 31).

It is a remarkable and enduring insight. We continue the story here, heeding the same call to attention but now shifting the demand away from how “the computer” of 1962 (when “the” IBM 790 or 7090 was indeed becoming increasingly common, but nevertheless remained “the” singular machine on a small number of major campuses) asked anthropologists to rethink their forms of analysis and cooperation, and turning to the more multiple, omnipresent, and interlaced digital technologies of the contemporary moment—no doubt an even more plentiful situation than Levi-Strauss might have imagined, but a situation calling, still, for attention to how anthropology might be rewritten in this roomy space filled with new digital technologies, new logics and practices of analysis, and, perhaps most importantly, new forms of data. Paying attention now means remaining open to new forms of theory and new ways to collaborate. It also means re-scripting, rewriting, or redesigning the digital platforms, or cyberinfrastructure, to support those new collaborations and theories.

Digital anthropology has taken and continues to take many forms: writing experiments in the form of blogs (e.g. Savage Minds²), video mashups (e.g. the work of Michael Wesch³), online ethnographies as well as ethnographies of the online (e.g. Chris Kelty,⁴ Gabriella Coleman,⁵ and Tom Boellstorff ⁶), multimedia-enhanced journal portals (e.g. culanth.org⁷), new publishing collectives (e.g. limn⁸), and various forms of hypertexts and “enhanced media” projects (e.g. Povinelli and Cho 2012). All of these writing experiments are enabled in part by new forms of technical writing, new codes and languages from XML to WordPress, tools that are written in or into rather than simply on digital media. Such experiments in digital anthropology are amply and ably covered elsewhere, including in this volume, so we do not review them in further detail here.

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Most of these, and similar digital anthropology projects, important and innovative as they might be, do not call for redesign of digital platforms—the rewriting of what we call the digital form. They can thrive quite well within the current, complex digital ecology. They also remain, by and large, in the mode of the individual anthropologist that has been the dominant methodological form for much of the history of the discipline.

Our focus here is on the need to experiment with digital form in ways that promise to rewrite ethnography and the ethnographic archive, entailing the redesign of the digital infrastructure on which they will exist. We look forward to digital anthropology projects that, by re-animating the ethnographic archive in a variety of ways, will also demand and enable new forms of collaboration among anthropologists. They will also enable and leverage new, more collaborative relations between anthropologists and other researchers not only in the human sciences, but also in computer, information, and data sciences as well.

Writing Cultural Critique, Digitally

To put that somewhat differently: the distributed digital technologies of the early twenty-first century reiterate the structural—and therefore also the experimental—conditions enabled by the mainframe computer of the 1960s, rather than simply repeat them. Those conditions are: a renewed attention to and questioning of what anthropological theory is and how it gets made, a renewed attention to and questioning of the forms (technical and textual infrastructures) that shape and carry anthropological theory, and a renewed possibility of and need for new forms of collaboration. Similarly, important experiments in digital anthropology also reiterate the arguments and proposals put forward in the mid-1980s signified by the publication of Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986) and Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986), which we combine here under the heading of Writing Cultural Critique. The Writing Cultural Critique tradition in cultural anthropology attends to the implications and limits of form—a poetics and politics of ethnography powered, in large part, by poststructuralist understandings of language developed through new exchanges with literary theorists, semioticians, philosophers, and others in the humanities from the 1980s onward.

One thread of the critique focused on the singularity and authority of the ethnographic voice in writing about other peoples, often with considerably less privilege or power. Another thread of the critique focused on time—the way both rhetorical conventions and the material form of the published book or article froze the people being represented in history, restricting recognition of both the ongoing development and the limits of ethnographic analysis of that development. The ethnographic monograph or article literally became the end of analysis. A third thread focused on problems of scale, calling for new forms to write the ways individual cultural actors embody, reproduce, and iterate the nested, often contradictory, cultural and political economic systems they inhabit and which, in turn, inhabit them.

Digital anthropology provides opportunities to reiterate and transform all of these threads of the Writing Cultural Critique of ethnographic form, and thus extend the tradition of experimentation they have engendered. The critical and experimental promise of digital anthropology, in our view, lies largely in the potential to enable more collaborative and open-ended ethnographic work/writing—across time, space, generations, and “cultures.”

This next generation of digital platforms in anthropology can re-purpose work over the last few decades in Writing Cultural Critique, work that foregrounded how cultural critique, innovation, and change emerge, in the world and in the discipline alike, while foregrounding the poetic and political force of the genre forms through which culture is expressed and understood. This now-extensive literature in cultural anthropology has drawn on literary and language theory to address the significance of genre forms both in everyday enactment of culture in different settings, and in scholarly representations of culture.

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As the “computer form” opened new possibilities for anthropology in the 1960s, visible in the projects of the Hymes volume, the new digital forms of contemporary anthropology platforms can re-purpose anthropological writing into new experimental veins in the twenty-first century. In order to do so, however, anthropologists will have to instantiate—in digital form—elements of the language ideology on which the 1980s legacy systems of anthropology drew. In other words, we have to read digital forms and infrastructures “against the grain,” and thus work to rewrite and redesign them. The “computer form” of the 1960s opened up new possibilities for data collection, its analysis, and for collaboration; it also harbored a language ideology that assumed the unmediated representation of pre-existing stable forms, through terms that were transparent and fully present to the ethnographer and ethnographic subject. The computer form meshed beautifully with the pre-Geertzian 1960s cultural anthropology of the Hymes volume, in which “interpretation” has only two brief index entries. Decades of developments in computer, data, and web sciences have mostly solidified such a code-centric language ideology, in large part through increasingly elaborate yet precise ontologies (sets of terms with definitive uses) used in projects of “knowledge representation.”

Poststructural, anthropological understandings of language, meaning, and culture are still at odds, then, with the language ideologies or assumptions that persist in most digital (“information” or “data”) infrastructure. Digital “tools for humanities work have evolved considerably in the last decade,” notes Johanna Drucker, but their “epistemological foundations and fundamental values are at odds with, or even hostile to, the humanities . . . because of the very assumptions on which they are designed: that objects of knowledge can be understood as self-identical, self-evident, ahistorical, and autonomous” (Drucker 2012, 85–6).

In other words, there is a politics to the “digital form,” but the form can always be read “against the grain” and thus—partially, iteratively—rewritten. Through such efforts, today’s “digital forms” can open up new possibilities for re-coding an information infrastructure that can harbor a language ideology more attuned to current understandings of both language and anthropology, in which sense disseminates and coalesces from the differences populating the system, from the changing relations by which those “differences make a difference,” and from the absences, limits, and aporias that configured the parameters of the system and its operation in ways that may not be fully assayable, but can be experimented with—worked and played with—productively and collaboratively.

This is where digital anthropology theory and practice could orient the development of new digital infrastructure that is “deviously designed,” as Lindsay Poirier phrases it, “leveraged . . . in ways that create tensions against its logics,” which it must simultaneously retain (Poirier 2015). We continue this chapter by describing our efforts to develop such “devious” digital infrastructure, the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE⁹), and the lessons learned as a result about both anthropology and digital infrastru...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Debating Digital Ethnography
• Part II Relationships
• Part III Visibility and Voice
• Part IV Place and Co-presence
• Part V Play
• Part VI Arts
• Part VII Infrastructures
• Part VIII Politics
• Part IX Design
• Index