https://player.vimeo.com/video/897269896?badge=0&autopause=0&player_id=0&app_id=58479 In Stripe Partners’ report The New Research Playbook, Stripe Partners outlined one important shift that practitioners need to embrace: the skillset shift from narrow user research to integrated data....
Tag: interdisciplinary research
Cultivating Emotional Resonance with Video Narratives
A VR headset floats in empty space, then a man straps it onto his head. A series of clips flash before our eyes: a guy wearing a jetpack jumps off a building, a pair of arms dodging a horde of zombies, two giant figures looking over a miniature island, C3P2O and R2D2. A voice off-screen introduces...
Theory Instruments as Tangible Ways of Knowing
While ethnographers and the data they produce already play a role in affecting industry practices, there is potential to integrate anthropological ways of seeing and knowing into a shared transdisciplinary...
Data Walks into a Bar: A Love Story
PechaKucha Presentation As a qualitative researcher, I was always a bit afraid – if not disdainful – of quantitative data. This pecha kucha tells the uneasy love story of how and why I fell in love with quantitative data. Transitioning from life as an ethnographer who avoided quantitative work at...
Hybrid Methodology: Combining Ethnography, Cognitive Science, and Machine Learning to Inform the Development of Context-Aware Personal Computing and Assistive Technology
The not-too-distant future may bring more ubiquitous personal computing technologies seamlessly integrated into people's lives, with the potential to augment reality and support human cognition. For such technology to be truly assistive to people, it must be context-aware. Human experience of...
Ethnographic Agency in a Data Driven World
This paper argues that ethnographers can gain increased agency in data-driven corporate environments by increasing their quantitative literacy: their ability to create, understand, and strategically use quantitative data to shape organizations. Drawing on the author's experience conducting...
Screenplay, Novel, and Poem: The Value of Borrowing From Three Literary Genres to Frame Our Thinking as We Gather, Analyze, and Elevate Data in Applied Ethnographic Work
Applied ethnography still struggles with the fundamental challenges of (1) framing research to obtain ‘thick’ data, (2) making sense of data in teams and with clients, and (3) making a convincing case with data in challenging environments. We have observed that borrowing from literary genres can...
Designing for Interactions with Automated Vehicles: Ethnography at the Boundary of Quantitative-Data-Driven Disciplines
Case Study—This case study presents ethnographic work in the midst of two fields of technological innovation: automated vehicles (AV) and virtual reality (VR). It showcases the work of three MSc. Techno-Anthropology students and their collaboration with the EU H2020 project ‘interACT’, sharing the...
Contextual Analytics: Towards a Practical Integration of Human and Data Science Approaches in the Development of Algorithms
As algorithms play an increasingly important role in the lives of people and corporations, finding more effective, ethical, and empathetic ways of developing them has become an industry imperative. Ethnography, and the contextual understanding derived from it, has the potential to fundamentally...
ReHumanizing Hospital Satisfaction Data: Text Analysis, the Lifeworld, and Contesting Stakeholders’ Beliefs in Evidence
Case Study—Declining clinician engagement, increasing rates of burnout, and stagnant patient and family experience scores have led hospital leadership at Seattle Children's Hospital to submit requests to a data scientist and an anthropologist to identify key themes of survey comments and provide...