Disrupted fieldwork and digital research encounters: Futures of digital ethnographic methods and interdisciplinary collaboration amidst global challenges

Abstracts

Can we scroll back in time? Social media feeds as ethnographic field sites and archives

by Katharina Berr, Weizenbaum Institute

In my dissertation project I investigate a community of science fans who organize in Facebook groups to disseminate and defend scientific expertise in the context of the Covid 19 pandemic. I came across this phenomenon in January 2021, when a post by one of the groups appeared in my private feed. I requested membership and, retrospectively, first entered the field of my digital ethnographic study.
Chronological events such as the release of vaccines or policy responses to the pandemic are crucial to understanding my phenomenon. However, social media newsfeeds are no longer chronological timelines, sorting things from newest to oldest, but automated and personalized. With this methodological project, I aim to better understand the role of temporality for digital ethnographic studies, especially data collection, in the context of social media feeds.

While interacting in the immediate moment (e. g., anticipating new comments to a post by watching the three animated dots, chatting with users through the messenger function), I also regularly scrolled through the most recent posts as curated by Facebook’s algorithm, or employed the search function to identify posts on specific topics, some of which were written and discussed before I even joined the groups. I therefore approached groups’ feeds both as field sites and archives, studying events in real time, in "right-time" (Bucher, 2020) and as past, archived events.

Tool makers, tool users, tool critics: Divisions of work in digital methods and the knowledge politics that follow

by Andreas Birkbak, Roskilde University

This paper discusses what happens when digital methods become organised around tools. Digital methods in STS have since their inception been informed by a device-oriented approach (Marres & Weltrevrede 2013), which holds that methods and objects of study are co-constitutive and divided only by porous boundaries (Rogers 2009). However, digital methods also tend to be framed in terms of tools for researchers, which makes digital methods come across as more distanced from the object of study. For instance, the notion of tools risks bringing in a division of work between tool makers, tool users and tool critics (van Es et al. 2018). I seek to characterise and contrast these three articulations of digital methods and their knowledge politics. Tool makers try to make things user-friendly while not black-boxing too much (Jacomy & Munk 2022). Tool users are impatient seekers of accessible and interesting data, the price being a distancing from the site of its production. Tool critics move slowly, insisting on paying experimental and ethnographic attention to the politics of methods and platforms. Across all three practices lies the question of what kinds of effects and results digital methods are expected to produce. I argue that the productive challenge for digital STS is to keep all three ingredients in the mix simultaneously. While some projects manage to do so, explicating and contrasting these three ideal typical practices can nevertheless help analyse, strengthen and perhaps ‘tool down’ digital methods a bit.

ASTROMOVES during COVID

by Jarita Holbrok, University of Edinburgh

ASTROMOVES is EU MSCA project to study the career decision-making of astrophysicists utilising an intersectional and gendered lens. The data collection design was for face-to-face interviews to take place at science gatherings such as conferences and workshops. The research centred identity and considered belonging as a factor for resilience in maintaining a research career, while acknowledging the tensions both externally and internally, science, social and cultural. It was proposed that 50 scientists would be interviewed and that they would embody gender, ethnic, regional, disability, racial and economic diversity. Though COVID disrupted my fieldwork and disrupted the lives of the astrophysicists, the diversity goals of the project were achieved and nearly 50 scientists were interviewed. Most interviews were done over the internet, which meant finding the best software program for having high resolution film and sound for both research purposes and for the documentary film. The original proposal to film at conferences would have provided important footage of each person performing being a scientist as they gave presentations and interacted with their colleagues – this level of analysis is now completely absent – also, this would have provided cutaways for the documentary film. Most of the scientists did their interviews at home, giving no glimpse into their work lives. I will show a film clip from the ASTROMOVES documentary that highlights the COVID disruptions, but also, I present it as an artifact of how STS research methods and film making methods had to adjust and change due to the Pandemic.

Rethinking the Screen: Vibrant in/visibilities as sites of methodological reflection

by Marjo Kohlemainen, University of Jyväskylä

(This presentation elaborates the role of digital screens in remote fieldwork. The presentation draws upon a research project where I explore how screens as part of therapy settings or counselling practices materialize – or fail to materialize – care. In that study, I empirically analyze how therapy and counselling professionals experience the role of technology during the Covid-19 pandemic. For that purpose, I conducted 40 interviews via Zoom.  As a point of departure, I approach digital materiality as a process, being interested in how screens come to matter in various, open-ended ways. In this presentation, I re-examine the data in order to develop a greater methodological understanding of the potential matterings of digital screens.

Instead of viewing the digital as a general and neutral medium, I thus trace potential specificities and the concrete operations of the screen. This kind of an approach enables to scrutinize not only how screens are used and deployed, but also how screens themselves act and operate. For instance, in therapy and counselling settings the issues of in/visibility are essential, even if the screen can still be considered as a window, a shelter, a bridge, or a wall. Thus, my approach foregrounds the screen as ‘multiple’. Further, acknowledging the agential capacities of all matter, I conceptualize screens as ‘vibrant matter’. In this presentation, I specifically reflect upon the methodological implications and consequences of this conceptualization.   

Digital methods after generative AI

by Anders Kristian Munk, TANTLab, Aalborg University

Since the early 2000s, digital methods in STS have been primarily defined by the ambition to repurpose born digital media and data for research (Rogers, 2013; Marres, 2017). This has particularly been the case in the context digital of controversy mapping (Marres & Moats, 2015; Munk & Venturini, 2021), where digital methods are employed as a way to trace how actors are able to raise and engage issues on and with different platforms and device cultures (Weltevrede & Burra, 2016). The popularisation of generative artificial artificial intelligence in 2022 with the advent of zero-shot models like Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, or Chat GPT, poses a series of new questions to this strand of digital methods, such as how do we do fieldwork with such models in order to build rapport with them and craft thick descriptions of the way they see different issues? And to what extent is it possible, thought such field work, to use such model as prism through which to understand issues in the data worlds on which they were trained? In this paper I discuss these questions through a field experiment with controversy mapping in Stable Diffusion and Chat GPT.

Organizers

Julie Sascia Mewes, Frauke Rohden, Sylvia Irene Lysgård