With insights from original, multinational research and analysis of key social science studies, this paper...
Tag: social media
Building Resilient Futures in the Virtual Everyday: Virtual Worlds and the Social Resilience of Teens during COVID-19
Virtual worlds have been central to an imagined future in which advances in technology propel new social practices. The recent focus within the technology industry on the “metaverse” is the latest iteration of...
Towards an Archaeological-Ethnographic Approach to Big Data: Rethinking Data Veracity
For its volume, velocity, and variety (the 3 Vs), big data has been ever more widely used for decision-making and knowledge discovery in various sectors of contemporary society. Since recently, a major challenge increasingly recognized in big data processing is the issue of data quality, or the...
Mother Tongue: The Role of Vernacular Knowledge in Chronic Illness and Healthcare
This work demonstrates how and why the expertise of non-medical actors, such as patients, caregivers, and...
Back to the Future of Work: Informing Corporate Renewal
This paper describes the results of a multi-year ethnographic study of how knowledge workers integrate new technology into their work practices. We studied mobile and remote workers who use smartphones, tablets, cloud computing, and social networking to support their work. Study findings describe...
Fighting Conspiracy Theories Online at Scale
This 2019 project conducted in the US and the UK sought to understand which conspiracy theories are harmful and which are benign, with an eye towards finding ways to combat disinformation and extremism. This case study demonstrates how ethnographic methods led to insights on what “triggered”...
Everyday Life in Tamil Nadu, India and Its Cost to “Free Basics”
This paper explores how the ‘Free Basics’ initiative in India got transformed into a national debate on ‘net neutrality’ principle and finally led to it being banned in India. Further, this paper will also use ethnographic data to analyse how this ‘controversial’ initiative was debated, the claims...
Sending out an SOS: Signals from Conflict-Affected Audiences in the Digital Communication Landscape
Crisis events can profoundly alter a person's relationship with technology that require product solutions to meet...
Living Avatars Network: Fusing Traditional and Innovative Ethnographic Methods through a Real-time Mobile Video Service
This paper presents a study of new technologies potentially enabling access to a sensory feast of places by ‘wired up’ flanêurs, real-time as well as remote ‘native’ description and interactions and situated oral histories excavated through ‘being in a place’. We describe an inter-disciplinary...
Evidence Outside the Frame: Interpreting Participants’ “Framing” of Information when Using Participatory Photography
This paper discusses the benefits and challenges of participatory photography as ethnographic evidence and how as researchers we can “read” the evidence our participants create. Drawing on examples from an ethnographic study examining concepts and constructions of community on Salt Spring Island,...