eFieldnotes

The Makings of Anthropology in the Digital World

Roger Sanjek, Susan W. Tratner, Roger Sanjek, Susan W. Tratner

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780812247787
• eBook ISBN: 9780812292213
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this volume, sixteen distinguished scholars address the impact of digital technologies on how anthropologists do fieldwork and on what they study. With nearly three billion Internet users and more than four and a half billion mobile phone owners today, and with an ever-growing array of electronic devices and information sources, ethnographers confront a vastly different world from just decades ago, when fieldnotes produced by hand and typewriter were the professional norm.Reflecting on fieldwork experiences both off- and online, the contributors survey changes and continuities since the classic volume Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology, edited by Roger Sanjek, was published in 1990. They also confront ethical issues in online fieldwork, the strictures of institutional review boards affecting contemporary research, new forms of digital data and mediated collaboration, shifting boundaries between home and field, and practical and moral aspects of fieldnote recording, curating, sharing, and archiving.The essays draw upon fieldwork in locales ranging from Japan, Liberia, Germany, India, Jamaica, Zambia, to Iraqi Kurdistan, and with diaspora groups of Brazilians in Belgium and Indonesians of Hadhrami Arab descent. In the United States, fieldwork populations include urban mothers of toddlers and young children, teen tech users, Bitcoin traders, World of Warcraft gamers, online texters and bloggers, and anthropologists themselves.With growing interest in both traditional and digital ethnographic methods, scholars and students in anthropology and sociology, as well as in computer and information sciences, linguistics, social work, communications, media studies, design, management, and policy fields, will find much of value in this engaging and accessibly written volume. Contributors: Jenna Burrell, Lisa Cliggett, Heather A. Horst, Jean E. Jackson, Graham M. Jones, William W. Kelly, Diane E. King, Jordan Kraemer, Rena Lederman, Mary H. Moran, Bonnie A. Nardi, Roger Sanjek, Bambi B. Schieffelin, Mieke Schrooten, Martin Slama, Susan W. Tratner.

PART I

TRANSFORMATIONS AND CONTINUITIES

Chapter 1

From Fieldnotes to eFieldnotes

Roger Sanjek

In 1979, the eminent social anthropologist Fei Xiaotong visited the United States for a month, the first return of this Malinowski student and Chinese public intellectual since the early 1940s (see Arkush 1981; Fei 1939). His “fleeting glimpses,” as he called them, were prescient. One of the first things he described was how, when he and a companion asked to move their airplane seat reservations so they could sit together, the airline desk attendant “instantly typed up some symbols on a fluorescent screen right next to her, and on the screen the answer needed came glowing out, and she took my seat number back and gave us two seats together.” He noted electronic devices “reorganizing the activity of men and of things” in stores, hotels, transportation terminals, universities, and libraries nationwide. Telephonic communication and computers, “living treasures” of American life, as he put it, “allow people dispersed in widely separated places to organize collective activity in an instant, and these collective activities can be begun and completed, without having to gather them in a designated place or continue them for a long time. A new kind of social collectivity has appeared. . . . If you follow this direction of development through,” Fei wrote, “it can have such an influence on the organization of the collective activity of mankind, that it really makes you ponder” (1979–1980: 6–7).¹

It would take another two decades before such pondering by anthropologists, or sustained ethnographic fieldwork concerning the impact and use of these new digital technologies, would emerge in earnest.² Meanwhile, in the early 1990s, the Internet, originally created by “a partnership among three groups: the [U.S.] military, universities, and private corporations . . . fused together into an iron triangle . . . during and after World War II,” was made publically accessible to a few million users, and, in 1993–1994, the World Wide Web (of URL addresses), developed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), became widely available (Isaacson 2014: 217–261, 405–419, 482–483). By 2004, there were six hundred million Internet users, and by 2015, 2.9 billion, some 40 percent of the world’s population.³ During this same period, cell (or mobile) phone networks expanded, and in 2010, there were more than four and a half billion subscriptions worldwide (Ling and Horst 2011: 363–364). Even more recently, Facebook since 2004, YouTube since 2005, Twitter since 2006, and other new platforms have reshaped the digital environment.

A few years after Fei’s visit, at the 1985 American Anthropological Association annual meeting, I chaired a session on fieldnotes, the anthropological writings that precede the writing of ethnography. In the resulting volume, Fieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology (Sanjek 1990a), my coauthors and I considered the forms, history, use, destinations, meanings, and resonances of fieldnotes over the one hundred–year history of ethnographic fieldwork. We identified the widespread disciplinary practice of transforming handwritten scratchnotes (inscriptions) into typed fieldnotes (descriptions) and their subsequent use in constructing ethnographic articles and books, a process developed and consolidated by founding figures Frank Cushing, Franz Boas, W. H. R. Rivers, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Margaret Mead. Much within anthropology has changed since our 1985 session, both theoretically and methodologically, but perhaps most significant is the impact of new technologies and modes of communication on our choice of fieldwork methods, sites, and issues. The perspectives on fieldnotes in our 1990 volume are not obsolete, but today they need rethinking and expansion.⁴

Digital Arrivals and Anthropological Fieldnotes

A sizable portion of the “vast and increasing corpus of [fieldwork] literature” (Parkin 2000: 259) published since 1990 contains little or no mention of fieldnotes⁵ or, at most, provides further elaboration of the processes of producing and using them and other field-based writings (such as diaries, letters, records, local documentation, previous researchers’ fieldnotes, and writings by assistants and collaborators) examined in Fieldnotes.⁶ Much of this discussion, moreover, refers retrospectively to the pre–personal computer and pre-Internet fieldwork eras.

The introduction of new digital technologies for analyzing, producing, circulating, and enhancing fieldnotes began in the 1970s, and early developments were acknowledged in Fieldnotes (Johnson and Johnson 1990; Sanjek 1990b: 38, 1990c: 389). At that time, the tedious coding of fieldwork results on IBM punch cards; running piles of them through data analysis programs on mainframe computers; and working with large, unwieldy, accordion-folded paper printouts, was still a fresh memory.⁷ Some digital databases for long-term fieldwork projects were started in this way during the 1970s and maintained and updated in later decades as digital technology improved (Black-Rogers 2001; Johansen and White 2002; Kemper 2002).

In the early 1980s, the major innovations were the home or personal computer (PC), and word processing software, and they revolutionized the writing of ethnography. As Harry Wolcott put it, “My typing has always been slow and riddled with errors. My dependence on others to type and retype my drafts slowed the . . . process immeasurably. . . . With my manuscript on the screen in front of me or quickly transformed to hard copy, I now edit continuously, rather than having to wait until someone finishes retyping a corrected draft” (1999: 267). For those conducting fieldwork “at home” or in settings abroad where desktop computers were available, the word processing of fieldnotes in digital text files quickly became the norm (see De Walt and DeWalt 2011: 175; Shore 1999: 26). Others continued to work in locales where this was not possible, such as Katy Gardner, who wrote her fieldnotes on a typewriter in Bangladesh during 1988 and 1989 (1999: 54), and Monique Skidmore, who produced hers manually in Burma during 1996 (2006: 49).

In the 1990s, portable laptop computers (and, later, notebooks and other devices) made word processing of fieldnotes in the field more common and less exceptional (Kemper 2002: 301). Joshua Hotaka Roth used a laptop during his 1994 fieldwork among Brazilian Nikkei in Japan (2003: 338)⁸; and by the early 2000s, this was practicable even in relatively remote fieldwork settings, such as Niger (Greenough 2006: 147) and, using a solar panel energy source, Soqotra Island in Yemen (Peutz 2006: 85; compare Bernard 2011: 297).

PCs and laptops also made data analysis “packages” readily available at home, in the field, or anywhere (Kemper 2002: 300–301; Royce and Kemper 2002: xxviii–xxix). Although such tools continue to play valuable roles in dealing with ethnographers’ (and team projects’) own “big data” sets (Bernard 2011; Kemper and Royce 2002), the allure of some imagined perfect text analysis software to do the hard work of coding, indexing, and turning fieldnotes into ethnography vanished during the 1990s (Stewart 1998: 52–56; Wolcott 1990: 32–35, 1999: 267–269) and remains a will-o’-the-wisp (DeWalt and DeWalt 2011: 175, 179–210; Heath and Street 2008: 94–95). As Alex Stewart put it then: “From beginning to end, inquiry [in ethnography] is characterized by non-linear cycles of comparisons between units of data and a range of other mental activities, including observation, labeling, indexing, reflections on various literatures and cases, memoing, and incipient theorization” (1998: 52).⁹ And as Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce, and T. L. Taylor put it now:

We could in principle use a range of qualitative data analysis programs [yet] it is striking that none of us ever used them. Our experience has been that they typically require a steep learning curve and are frequently constrained by analytic assumptions built into the software. . . . Instead, we opt for the flexibility of standard word processing, data-base, and spreadsheet programs—and even paper and pen—to comment on, highlight, move, and search for data. Thus, while not in any way discouraging the use of [such] programs, we emphasize . . . the key to data analysis is to interact with the dataset: read it, study it, immerse oneself within it. (2012: 165–166, and see 167–181)

In my reading of the fieldwork literature, the earliest mention of “the Internet” (Des Chene 1997: 82) occurs in Gupta and Ferguson’s Anthropological Locations (1997), which derives from a conference held in February 1994. The first actual use of the Internet while doing fieldwork that I have discovered is the student-advisor email correspondence, beginning in November 1994, between Allaine Cerwonka, who was conducting urban research in Melbourne, Australia, and Liisa Malkki, at the University of California, Irvine, an exchange that forms the basis of their book Improvising Theory (Cerwonka and Malkki 2007).¹⁰ Email quickly afforded an increasingly utilized communication channel—not only between fieldworkers and advisors but also with family and colleagues at home and to make opening contacts and maintain communication during and after fieldwork with those we study.¹¹ Using email, initially, and perhaps still for some of us, replaced sending handwritten or typed letters by postal services, thus rendering an established form of communication simpler and quicker to accomplish. (I have wondered, however, whether, while doing fieldwork during 1970–1971 in Accra, Ghana, the time and deliberation it took to compose each “monthly report” I mailed to my advisor in New York presented an “affordance” value that more frequent email exchange might obviate.¹²)

The next use of the Internet noted in the fieldwork literature was, by the later 1990s, visiting websites, many of which provided instantly the kinds of information ethnographers were accustomed to consult in published form or ferret out. Soon, the proliferating universe of URLs offered much more than this, and the Internet became a research medium utilized before, during, and after fieldwork (as well as in other professional activities) by all anthropologists (see Bestor 2003; Skidmore 2006: 55; Steinhoff 2003: 37). As Internet-enabled communication became more complex, ethnographers encountered and made use of web posts and responses, bulletin boards, chat rooms, listservs, blogs, text messaging, embedded videos, and social network sites (E. Coleman 2010).

In their introduction to Anthropologists in a Wider World: Essays on Field Research, derived from seminars at the Oxford Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in 1997 and 1998, two editors of the collection pronounced that “to understand forms of human life is to grasp connections [within] those settings in which people build some enduring sense of shared position” and that “until one engages with people closely, one does not know what those connections are,” whether the people are “clustered in a village, or spread across the internet” (Dresch and James 2000: 7). Nowhere in the volume was “the internet” mentioned again, but it was now an acknowledged component of the twenty-first century world that anthropologists confront.¹³

This was even more evident in Merry White’s reflection on her fieldwork in the 1980s and 1990s among Japanese teenagers.

This study was conducted before the widespread use in Japan of the Internet, cell phones, and beepers. . . . Now, most teens have access to a cell phone. . . . and email and chat rooms make access to friends, virtual and otherwise, an easy matter. . . . These new media . . . provide . . . vehicles for future research, both in themselves as objects of inquiry and as mediating devices for communication with informants. [Still,] the full “sociography” . . . must also include the street wisdom, the smell of the coffee shops, and the parade of fashion and styles teens will continue to experience. (2003: 33–35; see also Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda 2005)

Even as White’s words were published, anthropologists conducting dissertation research worldwide were using digital technologies “to keep in contact with home and up to speed with regional and global processes that impact the communities they study.” Moreover, “today’s informants and collaborators are also able to employ these technologies to inform themselves abou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I. Transformations and Continuities
• Part II. Fieldwork Off- and Online
• Part III. Digitally Mediated Fieldwork and Collegiality
• Part IV. Online Fieldwork and Fieldnotes
• Part V. Widening Complexities and Contexts
• List of Contributors
• Index