The first part of this workshop will focus on the use of traces in ethnography -- mostly digital traces, but other kinds too. Computational things -- like phones, social media, or The Internet -- pump out a lot of records about what they do, and what people are doing with them. These traces are 'thin', on their own they give little sense meaning or context, but ethnographic work can bring traces to life, especially when the ethnographer positions themselves to watch all the things that people do with these traces.
The second part of this workshop turns our attention to studying large (or long-term) things, even while sustaining an ethnographic sensibility. Dovetailing with the study of traces, scale too is generated in situ -- people 'here' pointing to things taken to be 'large' there. No matter how big (long-term or even small scale) things are, people always need to enact them right in the room, with images, numbers, gestures and words, all this observable to the ethnographer.
This workshop is based on these two methodological publications:
Ribes D. (2014). Ethnography of scaling, or, How to fit a national research infrastructure in the room. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW'14). ACM, 158-170.
Geiger, R. S., & Ribes, D. (2011). Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices. Proceedings of the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS).
David Ribes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Dr. Ribes's research focuses on the sociotechnical facets of eScience and how research infrastructures can support scientific investigations across changes in technology, policy and social organization. You can read more about David here: David Ribes | Human Centered Design & Engineering (washington.edu)