The Future of Digital Ethnography · a digital future is growing exponentially in the social sciences. In this short collection, the future of scholarship in digital ethnography,

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 1The future of digital ethnography

The future of digital ethnography


Contents

Acknowledgements 3

Foreword 5

Contributors 6

Understanding memory and meaning through metadata 7 in digital objects

Sharon Greenfield

Borrowing beneath broken data 9

Allister Hill

Creative workspaces 12

Tresa LeClerc

Musings on the strangeness of photographic 14 shadows, digital post-processing and authenticity

Yaron Meron

Digital rights and digital traces 17

Ekaterina Tokareva

Armchair anthropology 19

Zhang ‘Dino’ Ge

Are we witness to a war waged against 23 world-making practices?

Citt Williams

Who we are 24


Acknowledgements and credits

Acknowledgements:

The contributors to this short volume would like to thank Sarah Pink for providing the opportunity for the PhD community to show their vision for the future, John Postill for providing funding for the project and Bianca Vallentine for website support for showcasing our e-booklet and video.

Credits:

Book design: Yaron Meron and Natalia Alessi

Editing: Tresa LeClerc

Video production: Citt Williams and Zhang ‘Dino’ Ge

Cover photograph: Yaron Meron


Foreword

Jolynna SinananVice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral FellowSchool of Media and CommunicationDigital Ethnography Research Centre

It has become a truism to think and to say that the world is becoming more digital. The number of journal articles, volumes, conferences and symposia dedicated to trying to understand the digital present and the turn towards a digital future is growing exponentially in the social sciences. In this short collection, the future of scholarship in digital ethnography, that is, the students within the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University present their views on what the future of digital ethnography means to them.

One of the joys of my own PhD student experience (so very long ago, at the dawn of social and mobile media) was not only working with experts in my area, but also feeling that I was contributing to the growth of that area itself. It has been an absolute pleasure continuing an engaging discussion with this year’s cohort of PhDs, some having only commenced their candidature and

are awaiting milestones of confirmation and others who are approaching the end of their long journey.

We have been musing, mulling over and debating the future of digital ethnography and our place in the growing field. Each month this dedicated group of PhDs has brought their ideas and insights to our Digital Ethnography Reading Group and Writing Group and this short volume reflects some of these conversations. All of the contributors to this collection of thought pieces and short essays have utilised approaches in and reflected upon doing digital ethnography. They have selected evocative images that capture an aspect of what digital ethnography means to them and what the future might hold. Some of the questions they raise in relation to conducting research are more important than ever, to engage a world where diverse groups of people have been brought together in an a unprecedented way.

Our conversations are not easy. The group is truly interdisciplinary. Amongst the group is a graphic designer who has had a long career before turning to theorising design practice, a Silicon Valley professional, a filmmaker, an author, an anthropologist and a professional playbourer. Their continued debates strive to develop a conceptual vocabulary for a timely, relevant and empathetic digital ethnographic theory and practice.

We hope you enjoy this short collection and we hope it provokes your own reflections on The Future of Digital Ethnography. We would love for you to join our discussion.

Jolynna Sinanan is a Vice Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communications and the Digital Ethnography Research Centre at RMIT University. Previously, she was a Research Fellow in Anthropology at University College London with the European Research Council funded project Why We Post, which compared uses of social media across 8 countries. She is the co-author of Visualising Facebook (2017, UCL Press) and Webcam (2014, Polity) with Daniel Miller and How the World Changed Social Media (2016, UCL Press).


Tresa LeClerc is a writer and PhD candidate. As part of her creative project,

she is writing a ethnographically

informed novel, entitled All The Time Lost, that explores migrancy and the everyday in Melbourne, Australia. Her short story ‘American Riviera’, was published as part of the book 9 Slices and her academic writing has appeared in Writing in Practice: The Journal of Ethnographic Research.

Citt Williams is an international documentary film-maker and environmental

scientist who has been working closely

with Indigenous storytellers for over 15 years. At DERC, Citt continues her practice-based research exploring land rights in the digital era, particularly the tensions between knowledge, territory and technology @cittw

Dino Ge Zhang is, or wishes to be, an anthropologist. He is currently doing ethnographic

research on livestreaming websites

in China for his PhD project. In his spare time while not watching livestreams, he has also written on game cultures, online dating and urban renewal.

Ekaterina Tokareva is a PhD candidate and a lecturer with the school of Media and Communications.

The working title of her project is ‘The politics

of Internet governance in Russia’. By applying an ethnographic approach, the project seeks to contribute to an understanding of how struggles over the Internet governance unfold in Russia, who the actors are and what are the factors that influence those struggles. Ekaterina’s background is in History, Communication and Public Relations.

Yaron Meron is a designer and photographer with twenty years experience,

working internationally.

As a PhD candidate, his research investigates the use of dramaturgy, as a generative design methodology for making the familiar strange, to explore relationships between designers and stakeholders in professional design practice. Yaron holds Masters degrees in both design, and art in public space.Sharon Greenfield

is a PhD candidate and her dissertation focuses on young people

as they engage with digital media

during bereavement. Her research interests include digital bereavement and grief studies, material cultures, place making, and technology. Prior to pursuing her PhD, she was a researcher in the People and Practices Research Group at Intel Corporation. Contact: [email protected] and @SharonG

Allister Hill is an applied anthropologist and PhD candidate. Allister’s PhD is

an ethnography that examines the

relationship between materiality, space and sustainability in what may be considered a ‘smart’ building’. Allister also has experience in indigenous anthropology (Native Title and Heritage) and consumer/market research.

Contributors

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 6Understanding Memory and Meaning through Metadata in Digital Objects – by Sharon Greenfield

Understanding memory and meaning through metadata in digital objects

by Sharon Greenfield

Digital objects are images, sounds, video and text that are composed of data and organised by an ontology that is metadata. These digital objects are becoming a pervasive reality in societies and represent a cultural shift in humanity.

Digital objects are not just ones and zeros, they operate beyond binary code and circuit board signals. They are imbued with contexts and they hold meaning from the contexts from which they are created. These meanings are held within the metadata. Metadata is the descriptive data a computer uses to understand the structure or organisation of data such as a digital object.

For example, in an image of your grandmother and her yard that

you take with your camera there is metadata that identifies the camera make and model, the time and date that the image was created, the GPS coordinates where the image was created, the white balance of the image and your grandmother’s distance from your camera amongst far more information. All of this metadata creates context; the GPS shows location, the date connects to the weather that day in that particular place, the white balance metadata

explains that she was outdoors and the distance shows she was 10 feet from your camera. All of this metadata through context holds meaning.

To understand this ubiquitous digital milieu and the ways in which meaning and memory are engaged through digital objects,

we need to understand fully the metadata. I believe the future of digital ethnography will lie in the exploration and understanding of the metadata of digital objects.

Digital Ethnography is the research of digital language, customs and cultures on ‘the slow burn’. Anthropologists have documented

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 7Understanding Memory and Meaning through Metadata in Digital Objects – by Sharon Greenfield

our cultural shifts over the centuries and where previously shifts have occurred as to how cultures have been affected by space, architecture and time. Our next shift will be the ubiquity of cameras and imagery.

First architecture became ubiquitous, then time became ubiquitous, then the digital became ubiquitous and now digital images as objects will become ubiquitous. The camera will become integrated into everything as an expression of culture, there will be so much imagery that metadata will become a valuable affordance

to memory and the future of digital ethnography will be in capturing this whole new shift into being.

For example, take the structure of the arch and the idea of using mathematics to create the arch. The arch and by extension architecture and building presented a shift in the experience of ‘place.’ Architecture was birthed of the need to express emplaced cultural symbols and meanings, taken in the form of a building.

During the 20th century, Western culture had to wrangle and tame time because of the cultural adoption of precision due to the invention of flight travel. Clocks added a minute hand and time became standardized in all cities and hence time became specific and wristwatches became a material culture norm.

And from time, came the advent of the digital. From capturing and labeling minutes and seconds, came the exploration of the binary through the emergence of digital technology. To express our cultural symbols and languages we adopted digital technology which

transmogrified into new digital cultural symbols and languages as objects.

We now express our cultural symbols and languages in imagery as digital objects and it has become as normalised as architecture and concepts of time. The next major cultural shift lies in the ubiquity of digital cameras and images as digital objects.

Pervasive images will become omnipresent and as integrated into our society and culture just as architecture and time have become omnipresent. With both the normalisation of digital images and the influx of the amount of images, to understand and remember meanings we will have to contextualise the meaning of these digital objects through metadata. Thus, digital ethnography research can contribute to how we understand, remember and contextualise digital objects.

References

Hui, Y. (2012). What is a Digital Object? Metaphilosophy, 43(4), 380–395.

Miller, D. (1987). Material culture and mass consumption. Oxford, OX, UK ; New York, NY, USA: B. Blackwell.

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 8Borrowing beneath broken data – by Allister Hill

Digital ethnography can take us beyond the screens we interact with, on a daily basis, to unearth the visible and invisible material infrastructures that make our digital world possible. Dourish and Mazmanian (2013) remind us that the physical world is persistently felt, despite our information rich environment. When the conduits of the digital break down (such as a cloud service or network failing) or reach their material capacity (such as full hard drives or maxed out RAM and micro-processors),

we are obliged to reckon with the physicality of how this information is held and accessed. Furthermore, ‘the information that undergirds the “information society” is encountered only ever in material form, whether that is marks on a page or magnetized regions of a spinning disk’ (p. 93). Not only does digital stuff arise in material form, it is essential to also acknowledge the assortment of material properties digital information takes and their consequences for how we use, encounter and

Borrowing beneath broken data

by Allister Hill

The future of digital ethnography is not just as what we see, record and create in our digital interfaces but, rather, what lies beneath the surface. transform digital stuff. By focusing

on information as a material object, conceptualisations of the materiality of goods become not just about evaluating a dichotomy of object and importance, but more about the consequences of form itself, and forms of consequence for the development of information and everyday practices.

Concentrating on information infrastructure and the infrastructures of communication (and especially those that underpin the digital and ubiquitous computing), Star (2002) suggests that this seemingly ‘boring’ and

inconsequential element is essential to be able to ‘read the invisible layers of control and access, to understand the changes in the social orderings that are brought about by information technology’ (p. 107). Turning the ethnographic lens to messy and mundane materials that are often difficult to unpack, is not to everyone’s taste. But they form a crucial backbone as to how practices are performed and require a reading of the ‘deeper social structures’ that are embedded within our digital landscapes. Arguably, the clashes one finds with how infrastructures shape practices, meanings and vice


versa, Star suggests is a staple of ethnographic enquiry allowing the ethnographer to remain a stranger and analyse that strangeness. This not to say all infrastructures or all people for that matter find infrastructure to be boring and mundane. Ethnography can unearth the ‘deeply affectual’ relationships that people have with infrastructure in often surprising ways (Larkin 2013). Ethnographic methodologies also allow a dissecting of the revolutionary fervour that accompanies the

ongoing innovation of digital infrastructures and the material worlds they underpin. Focusing on the mundane and taking the time to observe the actuality of practices can make both revolutionary and glacial transformations more visible (Bowker et al. 2010).

Pink et al. (2016) have recently explored the concept of ‘broken data’, where an emphasis on data’s materiality and acknowledgment of digital data’s ‘thingness’ reveals that it often breaks, leaks and is lively. My work expands on this and explores broken data in the following ways: all the data that is collected but can’t be used; all the data that could be collected but isn’t able to be accessed and all the data that is collected but can’t be made sense of or is too overwhelming for those people interacting with it (with limited skills and tools).

This is what a future of digital ethnography offers in the face of the explosion of connected devices, where collectability and interoperability are just as important as all the pie in the sky promises about what can

be done with that data. These interests lay the ground for the digital ethnographer to help put the brakes on the utopian urgings and slick marketing (Marr 2015a, 2015b), by exploring in what ways data breaks, decays or even goes astray. This would take one outside of the infrastructural capacities of the goliaths of the internet who we willing feed our lives and data to and whom have the ability and data centres to trawl, store and mine our inputs endlessly - in essence being what many would readily constitute as Big Data – possessing the 3Vs (volume, velocity and variety) and much more (Kitchin & McArdle 2016). It is the smaller fish working within the more confined spheres, that while they may operate infrastructures that have the capacity to sense, generate and collect Big Data, the sociomaterial realties of those organisations actually require the kind of divinations that one would expect in more volatile urban and infrastructural environments (Trovalla & Trovalla 2015). This is where by focusing on the practicality of infrastructural

doings and interactions, the digital ethnographer can help, to borrow from Dominic Boyer (see interview with Ian Lowrie (Lowrie 2014a, 2014b), burrow ‘beneath the surfaces of institutions’ to better understand the actualities of digital materialities.

Organisations and the corporations that supply and maintain their digital infrastructures, may salivate over the nascent ‘disruptive’ potential of data gathered from their devices - such as where one’s colleagues are located within the buildings they occupy - this data is often inaccessible and unable to be divined for the purposes that, at first glance, seem so easy and close


at hand. For in some instances, even attempting to try and gather that data will overload already overworked infrastructures.

The digital ethnographer can be at the forefront of what is good and bad data, how it breaks and when is it just not fit for purpose. That’s the kind of literal disruptions of which I plan to be at the forefront.

---- 2014b, Dominic Boyer on the Anthropology of Infrastructure (Part II), blog.castac.org, March 07, <http://blog.castac.org/2014/03/dominic-boyer-on-the-anthropology-of-infrastructure-part-ii/>.

Marr, B (ed.) 2015a, Big Data: Using SMART Big Data, analytics and metrics to make better decisions and improve performance, Wiley, Chichester, UK, via nlebk (EBSCOhost).

---- 2015b, ‘Why the smart data revolution creates opportunities for firms of every size’, City A.M., Jan 26, p. 23.

Pink, S, Ruckenstein, M, Willim, R, Ardévol, E, Berg, M, Duque, M, Fors, V, Lanzeni, Db, Lapenta, F & Lupton, D 2016, Data Ethnographies 5: Broken Data, <https://dataethnographies.com/paper-v-broken-data/>.

Star, SL 2002, ‘Infrastructure and ethnographic practice: Working on the fringes’, Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 107-21.

Trovalla, E & Trovalla, U 2015, ‘Infrastructure as a divination tool: Whispers from the grids in a Nigerian city’, City, vol. 19, no. 2-3, pp. 332-43.

References

Bowker, GC, Baker, K, Florence, M & Ribes, D 2010, ‘Toward Information Infrastructure Studies: Ways of knowing in a networked environment’, in J Hunsinger, M Allen & L Klastrup (eds), International Handbook of Internet Research, Springer, Dordrecht; Heidelberg; London; New York, pp. 97-118.

Dourish, P & Mazmanian, M 2013, ‘Media as Material: Information representations as material foundations for organizational practice’, in PR Carlile, D Nicolini, A Langley & H Tsoukas (eds), How Matter Matters: Objects, artifacts, and materiality in organization studies, OUP Premium, Oxford, pp. 92-118, via nlebk (EBSCOhost) <http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780199671533.do>.

Kitchin, R & McArdle, G 2016, ‘What makes Big Data, Big Data? Exploring the ontological characteristics of 26 datasets’, Big Data & Society, vol. 3, no. 1.

Larkin, B 2013, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure’, Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 42, no. 1, pp. 327-43.

Lowrie, I 2014a, Dominic Boyer on the Anthropology of Infrastructure, blog.castac.org, March 03, <http://blog.castac.org/2014/03/dominic-boyer-on-the-anthropology-of-infrastructure/>.

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 11Creative Workspaces – by Tresa LeClerc

On the table, next to the iPhone is a pile of beads and sugarcane. “Kandie Carter’s Crafts” YouTube channel is blinking on the screen, her cheery voice filling the room. Cecilia stops it and listens for her daughter, Lola. ‘She must be playing in her room,’ she thinks to herself. She contemplates making Kandie’s beaded spiral necklace with matching earrings to sell at the Sunday market.

Cecilia kneels down and reaches for the box hidden under the sofa.

It crunches as it runs over the broken crisps on the carpet. Inside are bags of small, colourful beads and fishing line. Needles. Knots. She throws them on the table next to the phone. On the screen, Kandie’s face is frozen, her eyes wide, like the ones painted on Lola’s dolls. Cecilia listens again to make sure Lola is not crying before pressing the red arrow. Behind Kandie, the pink lucky cat that had stopped mid-wave begins its slow repetitive downward greeting.

Creative workspaces

by Tresa LeClerc

Crafts and Sugarcane

Like the rosebuds unfurled by young impatient fingers and left beheaded on the carpet, Cecilia had brought about this artificial moment.

Kandie is leaning forward as she talks. A necklace made of beautiful unfamiliar stones seems to pull her down with the weight of them. Cecilia hears a noise. She looks up. Her daughter is looking at her with a bright I-found-you smile. Not you. It. She does not realize that Lola has grabbed the phone until it is in the air, against the wall, on the floor. Cecilia retrieves the phone. She brushes the cracked screen with her jumper, replaces it on the table. She pulls the timeline back with her finger, starts again at 00:15.

Can we not go back in time?

Fiction writing and ethnographic fieldwork accounts have much in common. In his introduction to Writing Culture, Clifford (1986) muses that the boundary between art and science is blurred. Science advocates objectivity and reporting observed facts in writing, while Art is associated with subjectivity, metaphor and allegory. This is taken a step further with digital ethnography, which explores the

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 12Creative Workspaces – by Tresa LeClerc

ways in which culture and society can be researched through digital media (Pink et al 2016).

My interests lie in how the digital enables us to create. In the ‘90s, I wrote stories in typing class on an old green-cursored Apple computer in the hot plastic-smelling laboratory of my middle school. We carried with us lined pieces of paper containing our writing. That is what we wrote, what had been written. The computer itself, a writing implement.

Now it connects us to the digital, with new programs, languages and spaces. To Bakhtin (1981, p.7), the novel represented ‘the tendencies of the new world still in the making.’ This ‘actively polyglot’ world contained the new cultural and creative consciousness. This is the space where languages and digital culture intersect. The language of code, the emoticon, Google translate, the gif, meme, the YouTube Vlog, arguably exist simultaneously in the digital space. The ‘making’ is constant, transient, decontextualised.

How then, can it be captured? In the above photographs are creative workspaces. The first is the materials to make beaded

jewelry. What is notably absent is the iPhone playing a YouTube video, which taught the artist to make beaded pendants. The second is the desk of a PhD creative practice candidate at RMIT University. The third is the non/fiction Lab’s Urban Writing House, a space ‘used to host writers, poets, meetings, artists and makers in residence’ (nonfictionlab 2016). Projected onto the wall is Hannah Brasier’s interactive documentary. In these spaces, the digital meets the creative. In my opinion, it is the image, the metaphor, the art that plays on meaning, constantly combining and recombining, adjusting to the new contexts, that embodies the ‘making’ of our future.

References

Bakhtin, MM 1981, ‘Discourse in the novel,’ The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Clifford, J 1986, ‘Introduction,’ Writing culture: the poetics and politics of ethnography: a School of American Research advanced seminar, J Clifford & GE Marcus (eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press.

nonfictionlab 2016, ‘Urban Writing House,’ non/fictionLab, http://nonfictionlab.net.au/2016/03/urban-writing-house/

Pink, S, Horst, H, Postill, J, Lewis, T, & Tacchi, J 2016, Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practice, Los Angeles, United States: Sage Publications Limited.

Musings on the strangeness of photographic shadows, digital post-processing and authenticity – by Yaron Meron © DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 13

This is most often attributed as a response to Sontag’s ‘On Photography’ (Behrmann 2013), although this is debatable. Sources which credit the phrase “art is not what you see, but what you make others see” to Edgar Degas are even murkier. What matters for the sake of this piece, is less the contextual interpretations or authenticity of these quotes, than their elevation as statements of authority with regards to the generative nature of using imagery

as a creative process for making the familiar strange.

Debates around notions of photographic authenticity and truthfulness are even more tedious, unhelpful and endless. Whether it is about documentary photography, such as Robert Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’ (Capa 1936), or more recent debates about digitally edited news photographs (Meron 2014), the discourse appears cyclical. That as far back as the

1930s, and earlier, Brassai and others were staging and doctoring apparent documentary images (McNatt 1999), is enough to render the discussion moot, long before we get anywhere near the invention of Photoshop. However we frame it (pun intended), to create or even reflect upon photographic imagery is to make strange.

Making strange is a concept attributed to Victor Shklovsky, who used poetry to manipulate language to overcome what

Musings on the strangeness of photographic shadows, digital post-processing and authenticity

by Yaron Meron

he described as automatisation or ‘habitual recognition’ (Shklovsky 1965).

Within the context of this paper, the photographic form, as well as the photographic process, are going to be considered strange phenomenological manifestations. John Berger’s dictum, of photography being inherently strange, allows us to position the language and form of photography as products of process, as well as practice. Specifically, the photograph itself (even in isolation

John Berger is quoted and hashtagged enthusiastically in a variety of online domains as having said “what makes photography a strange invention – with unforeseeable consequences – is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” (Berger 1982, p85).

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 14

from the photographic process) becomes strange. Embracing photography’s inherent strangeness, the photographic examples on this page are so removed from their original subject (the bicycle) that this original becomes removed from its familiarity, rendering it strange.

In the first bicycle image (fig 1), one can predominantly see the shadow of the ‘original’. However, a cropped fragment of the ‘original’ remains in the frame. In the second

image (right, fig 2), only the shadow is viewable.

Leaving aside the processes involved in capturing the photographs, both images have obviously been post-processed (is it possible not to post-process an image?). However, the second photograph (fig 2) has been subjected to several more levels of post-processing (or digitally generated strangeness) than the first photograph. The shadow was photographed on a pavement,

but has been manipulated so that the bicycle shape appears upright. Ironically, despite this distortion, the manipulated shadow assumes a more familiar visual form of an actual bicycle, as we are used to engaging with it, than the more empirically authentic portrayal of the bicycle in the first photograph.

In this second photograph (fig 2), the bicycle’s apparent uprightness is more comforting and familiar. Its wheels are barely distorted and the seat is prominent and welcoming. One could almost

imagine sitting astride the seat of the shadow of this metaphorical bicycle and riding it away.

This is more than can be said for the first image. In that photograph, one is drawn to the subject merely as a shadow, rather than as a bicycle itself. Perhaps this is because of its distorted handlebars, which assume a kind of gothic swanlike posture. In addition, the wheels are splayed at disturbed angles to each other and, even though we are able to see the original form of the ‘physical’

Musings on the strangeness of photographic shadows, digital post-processing and authenticity – by Yaron Meron

fig 1

fig 2

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 15Musings on the strangeness of photographic shadows, digital post-processing and authenticity – by Yaron Meron

bicycle as a reference within the photographic frame, the subject is more identifiable as just a shadow. A metaphoric reflection of the original.

So, what does all this mean?

It means that theorising photographic imagery, particularly in an age of increasing vernacular digital reproduction, is more complex and continually evolving than ever before. Debates about

authenticity and originality are increasingly meaningless, whilst at the same time, likely to be increasingly ongoing. However, now that monkeys have become photographers (Associated Press 2016), the paradigms and formats with which we engage with these debates will continue to shift.

By accepting, as a strength, that photography is a generative process for making the familiar strange, rather than a limitation of the practice – and by not letting

References

Behrmann, K. (2013). “Ways Of Seeing.” Retrieved 17/10/2016, 2016, from http://artofcreativephotography.com/essay/ways-of-seeing-john-berger/.

Berger, J. (1982). Appearances. Another Way of Telling. J. Berger and J. Mohr. New York, Pantheon Books.

Capa, R. (1936). “The Falling Soldier.” Retrieved 17/10/2016, 2016, from http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/283315.

McNatt, G. (1999). “Brassai revealed true Paris via artifice.” Retrieved 17/10/2016, 2016, from http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1999-11-01/features/9911010266_1_brassai-poetic-realism-paris-by-night.

Meron, Y. (2014). “Photography, truth, reality, objectivity and other chestnuts.” Retrieved 7 October 2016, 2016, from https://www.crunchyspaces.com/content/photography-truth-reality-objectivity/.

Press, A. (2016). “Monkey selfie case: judge rules animal cannot own his photo copyright.” Retrieved 17/10/2016, 2016, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/monkey-selfie-case-animal-photo-copyright.

Shklovsky, V. (1965). Art as Technique. Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays. L. T. Lemon and M. J. Reis: 3-25.

ourselves be distracted by third party debates around authenticity – it allows creative practitioners to more comfortably engage critically with wider discourses around the use of photographic images.

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 16Digital rights and digital traces – by Ekaterina Tokareva

movements succeeds, we might see a different digital environment, which will, to use Julian Assange’s words, enable ‘privacy for the weak, transparency for the powerful’.

The second photo is a screenshot of Glenn Greenwald’s public key. Collaboration between Greenwald and Edward Snowden made information about the NSA’s

The answers to these questions will depend on who has ownership of and access to users’ data, and who controls digital technologies.

Users’ data is becoming an important commodity for private companies and we are currently witnessing data as becoming a source not only for decision-making, but also for regulation for governments.

The first photo is a snapshot of Google’s Transparency Report. It

is indicative of situations where governments and companies apply increasing pressure to get as much access to users’ data as possible. By blocking and removing content, users’ contributions to digital spaces is limited or restricted.

Growing digital rights movements, networks and groups seek to problematise restrictions of movement and create an environment in which users have much more control over their data. If one of these digital rights

Digital rights and digital traces

Ekaterina Tokareva

surveillance program public. This represents the kind of result that can be achieved when the use of encrypted communication is combined with the freedom of information ethos.

The contest between privacy and surveillance might take a new

The future of Digital Ethnography will be shaped by the struggle for digital rights. How will people interact in the digital world? What kind of digital traces will they leave?

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 17Digital rights and digital traces – by Ekaterina Tokareva

turn with the advent of quantum computing. As the headline from the third picture indicates, the quantum computer is predicted to be able to break RSA encryption – the type of encryption most popular among private users. The further quantum computing develops, the higher the chance that it will be able to break any currently existing encryption, thus shifting the balance of power between users, governments and companies once again, although it is hard to say at the moment in whose favour.

The role of digital ethnography is to capture these shifting relationships between people, data and technology. Among the main challenges will be the question of ethics: how to get access to data, what data is okay to use, how to navigate between the boundaries of public and private.

Photo URLs

1. https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/

2. https://firstlook.org/wp-uploads/sites/1/2015/02/GlennGreenwaldPGP.asc

3. http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/computing/hardware/encryptionbusting-quantum-computer-practices-factoring-in-scalable-fiveatom-experiment

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 18Armchair Anthropology – by Zhang ‘Dino’ Ge

However, I do not want to and neither am I able to construct a new theoretical paradigm to defend the discipline, if it’s even necessary in the first place. In desperation, I resort to an introspective reflection on my own fieldwork of watching Chinese livestreams.

Apart from several months of travel in China, the majority of my fieldwork involves sitting in my armchair at my home, 8000km

away from China, staring at my screens, typing, talking into the microphone and staying still for hours. For an ordinary viewer of a livestream, ‘being there’ constitutes both the witness of the event unfolding in front of the livestreamer’s camera and active participation in the chat room. For the ethnographer, it is roughly the same because I share a digital space with others, however remotely. As many digital

Armchair anthropology

by Zhang ‘Dino’ Ge

The double crisis of digital ethnography encompasses the following: firstly the digital has lost its initial novelty and is constantly under the threat of the emerging regime of the postdigital and secondly: the removal of ethnography from anthropology has greatly encouraged its application in interdisciplinary contexts, which also gradually leads to a certain degree of exhaustion.

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 19Armchair Anthropology – by Zhang ‘Dino’ Ge

anthropologists have argued, virtual worlds constitute legitimate field sites, the dichotomy between virtual and real runs obsolete and even multiple spatial scales can operate simultaneously in a digital event. I can temporarily suspend the consideration of other spectating bodies in front of their screens and resist the thought of contesting the boundaries of the field site by attending to matters at hand: monitoring the livestream video, the chat messages and typing notes. But I cannot ignore my own physical presence sitting in my armchair in front of my screens. So this is not a theoretical move on field sites but a consideration of practicality. To begin with, this includes a few technical matters: a difference of time zone (attuning myself to peak hour in China means staying up very late or waking up very early), connection issues to Chinese servers (paying for an expensive fibre connection and enduring the constant reloading and refreshing on a daily basis due to both the notorious speed throttling of the Australian ISPs and the infamous Great Firewall of China), and

finally the necessity of a cozy armchair. Occupational hazards of the livestream ethnographer: hemorrhoids, bloodshot eyes, stiff neck.

Fieldwork is not ‘supposed’ to be deskwork but desk-field-work has become mundane for anthropologists today. Maybe it’s time to rectify the much denigrated armchair anthropology. The 19th century armchair anthropologist was ridiculed by 20th century anthropology for only synthesising the materials by other travellers instead of actually going through the ordeal of fieldwork, which is the disciplinary and personal rite of passage. The 21st century armchair observer seems to be situated in the right temporality given the ubiquity of visual ethnography, virtual ethnography, netnography and digital ethnography today – presupposing both an ethnographic study of the digital and an ethnographer utilising digital tools. Digital tools, in my case of armchair participant observation, are not just recording technologies such as Go Pros and webcams but software. There is no standard ethnographic

recording or coding software available for me. My initiation into the publics of livestream spectators includes learning and understanding their indigenous software spontaneously with my informants so as to extract metadata, chat logs, and catalogue them. It begins with crawling on Github and obscure internet forums for various useful java or python programs; it works for a while until the website releases a new update; repeat the process or make some programmer friends and get a free meal. The digital offers great promises of accuracy and preservation but in practice it is another story. The practice of archiving livestreams and screenshots is especially time-sensitive and requires consistent efforts and gradual accumulation. Online databases (such as platforms like YouTube and Tumblr) of Chinese livestreams are the most precarious since they are still guerrilla archives and never institutionalised. It is thus instrumental to develop offline (or private server based) tactics of storage and organising a research database.

Lastly, the ethnographer’s eye is a crucial component of the toolset. Do we still say simply watching a livestream is not participation but observation? Perhaps televisual seriality did not become extinct in the age of internet videos and distraction is still a necessity. The point is, for most viewers, if they don’t like a channel, they can switch after staying for 30 seconds. Participation is a matter of choice. As an ethnographer of livestreams (and unpopular channels mainly so I can document the process of growth or decline of individual channels), I have the obligation of not switching. Eyewitness is the key to ethnography. This particular kind of eyewitness involves a lot of waiting because although excitements do occur they only do so unexpectedly. This is why short clips like stream highlights can never grasp the totality of the experience. The quintessence of the contemporary armchair anthropology is not necessarily passivity or alienation from the ‘field’, but the endurance of the distributed ‘field’, the reliance on various digital tools and not forgetting about sensory faculties we are already equipped with.

© DERC - Digital Ethnography Research Centre 2017 20Are we witness to a war waged against world-making practices? – by Citt Williams

Here in Far North Queensland, demanding Yalanji responsibilities to the oldest tropical rainforest in the world reveal there are ethical ethnographic processes that need to be enacted. For us, this involves world-making through a slowly negotiated collaborative documentary.

The Anthropo-not-seen, Cadena argues is the name for the latest wave of Euro-centric reterritorialization that is destroying what resists being made in its image. Similarly, post-colonial theorists like Spivak, (1988),

Andean-based anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena argues so. After much reflection on Indigenous cosmopolitics, she writes that ‘the separation of entities into nature and culture’ is an antagonistic world-making practice that politically forces the presence of many worlds into one (Cadena, 2010, 2015).

Cadena links this destructive charge to Rancière’s partage du sensible (2004). Translated as the distribution of the sensible,

Ranciere contends ‘perception and meaning dictates what will count as commonly sensible and what is, otherwise, mere noise, babble or insensible. Such division between the sensible and the insensible is the locus of political struggle [that] manifests when groups, individuals or collectivities whose modes of perception are deemed illegitimate (i.e. insensible) by a governing partition of the sensible demand to be taken into account’ (Panagia, 2014, p. 97).

Are we witness to a war waged against world-making practices?

Citt Williams

Chakrabarty, (2000) and Gajjala, (2013) have argued that a plurality of alternate worlds (and world-making practices) are rendered voiceless, invisible and positioned a subordinate ‘other’ in a variety of social contexts.

Within environmental world-making practices online, certain sensibilities are being forced into a common sensory deprivation. For example, everyday online, I may read/hear a diversity of cultural world representations, but rendered sensible from the noise and babble is what Rancière would

Divergence

[metadata keywords: climate change, indigenous, political ecology, creative practice research, divergence]

“Technology as a masonry of political world-making” (Ezrahi, 2012)

[Image: Bana Yarralji Bubu? the land of the Nyungkalwarra? Our richly inhabited field as aesthetically

rendered by transnational firm, Google. Source: Google Maps, 2017]


consider a ‘division of proprietary and a division of the sense’ (Panagia, 2014, p. 97). Technology design, Escobar (2013) asserts, has a certain world-systems organizing affect that Leach & Wilson (2014) argue flattens difference (of being) in assumptive euro-centric ways (see the work of da Costa Marques, 2014; Verran & Christie, 2014; Dourish, 2016).

In a similar way, by the privileging of data-driven climate science, governance institutions continue to judge divergent climate knowing practices subject to scientific endorsement (Cruikshank, 2005; Krupnik & Carleton-Ray, 2007). Jasanoff (2010) argues, by rendering experience obsolete science creates facts by detaching knowledge from meaning, whereas ‘meanings are emergent from embedded experience’ (p. 233, 237).

It is not hard to see... an eloquent critique of modern bio-politics, with its dispassionate statistical gaze and its tendency to simplify in order to aggregate, to a point where the essential meanings and

purposes of human existence are deleted (Foucault, 1980; Scott, 1998) (in Jasanoff, 2010, p. 239).

This discursive ‘statistical gaze’ is described as an aesthetic combination of remote-sensing satellite images and data-driven climate models that are detached, pixilated and mechanically replicable (Edwards, 2010; Howes, 2003). Considered a modernist aesthetic, remoteness is connected to cognitive mastery, reason and knowledge (Foster, 2010). Further, Kallinikos (2005) argues the functional simplification of computational modeling utilises discrete logics and percentile uncertainties that irresponsibly statistically smooth over the everyday textures and disruptive forces of existence.

As divergent forms of life, plants, animals, minerals, mountains, rivers, humanimals , cyborgs and emerging intra-acting forms (both known and undisclosed) all share a common insensibility to euro-centric modernity (Stengers, 2011). Yet environmentally, political allegiances to agential non-human

entities are making serious political headway (Vidal, 2011; Whanganui Iwi and The Crown, 2011), and rattling the underpinnings of democratic processes that struggle to cohere these political forces (Smith, 2016). Andean ‘earth-beings’ (De la Cadena, 2015), ‘earth-others’ (Plumwood, 2002, p. 137) and examples culturally emplaced in Maori, Saami, Inuipiat and Australian Aboriginal sensibilities (amongst many more) threaten to tear the governmental fabric and the excesses of our neoliberal thought.

Emplaced, our project is currently slowly working through how we as learners and teachers enact knowledge-making encounters in regards to relational commitment, respect & responsibility and the maintenance work of performative world-making.

“The specificity of intra-actions [a rearing of a relational form] speaks to the particularities of the power imbalances of the complexity of a field of forces” (Barad, 2012).

Woven into this socio-ecological fabric, we urge digital research

institutes to also be response-able and nurture ethical know-how in research fellows, ethical approval processes and emerging teaching curriculums. As a practitioner with a view from the inside, digital researchers with an ethical toolkit are better attuned, grounded and intra-active as ecologies morph. Importantly, as emplaced sensibilities begin to diverge then the powerful ‘poetics of an open work’ (Eco, 1962) can respectfully begin...

1. Here (Instone, 2015, p. 136) provides the

example of a human and dog walking.

Walking with a canine companion can

stretch ‘perceptions to smell-scapes,

different styles of directionality, as well as

an enhanced sociality’.

2. For examples of divergence see Barad,

2012; Haraway, 1992 and 2008; Johnson,

2010; Rautio, 2017; Reinert, 2016)


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The Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC) focuses on understanding a contemporary world where digital and mobile technologies are increasingly inextricable from the environments and relationships in which everyday life plays out. DERC excels in both academic scholarship and in our applied work with external partners from industry and other sectors.

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