We've Never Done It This Way Before: Boundaries of Digital Ethnography

Background

This chapter takes an autoethnographic approach to examining how practice is shaped in online community, and what boundaries and affordances there are for identity and considering pedagogy in online spaces, while at the same time exploring the boundaries and possibilities of autoethnographic work in the digital world. Ellis et al. (2011) described the autoethnographic project, suggesting: “As a method, autoethnography combines characteristics of autobiography and ethnography. When writing an autobiography, an author retroactively and selectively writes about past experiences” (p. 275). Autoethnography, then, is never a complete written encounter, although the level of description aimed for in ethnographic work can be attained through the selective focus of particular moments, reflections, and memories. Bhattacharya (2017) noted that autoethnography is an approach in which “the researcher takes a personal, reflexive journey into parts of her experiences and systematically analyzes these experiences with the cultural context of where those experiences occur” (p. 25). It is the interaction and mingling of the personal, narrative aspects of journey alongside systematic and intentional analysis within particular contexts that positions autoethnography as a unique and useful methodology. As the author will explore in this chapter, taken up in a digital context, autoethnography presents interesting and generative affordances, given the landscape of digital environments.

In this author’s work, the use of this method often results in the process of accessing memories that were not as salient prior to beginning of the process. So far, much of this work nostalgic and commemorative work has been done with old family photographs and revisiting books, including comics and graphic novels, that were salient in the author’s youth. The textual formulation of the autoethnographic journey is one that subsumes narrative results in a kind of unfolding process, linking experience to memory. As a researcher who considers developing and exceptional literacies, the ways in which autoethnography is interwoven with the spoken and written word provide a sense of storytelling intrigue, a narrative plot that is not only based on true events, but linked closely to truth in a disclosure of self and exploration of the community and world.

In this case of technological/digital ethnography and autoethnography, the text(s) of encounter is/are captured most often by the function of the search history, the save feature, and the recorded moment in virtual time. Such tools and techniques are part of the ontology of the research landscape itself. The data exists in a technological stream, within a wider network of information that can be hyperlinked and located with a keystroke, assisting in memory at times in a more multidimensional and multimodal regard than can be accomplished through the examination of traditional print texts. Such are the tools and methods of the digital ethnographer, some miles away from jottings in journals and wisps of memory after days, months, or years in the field. Within the context of ethnography, the consideration of an external cultural context might be considered as the researcher gains further entry into the environment. In autoethnography, the researcher is likely already inserted, positioned, or living and being within the environment under study. In a physical environment, particularly in classroom studies, Frank (1999) has noted the utility of observation protocols, interviews, and ethnographic field notes in collecting data. Frank (1999) suggested that the aim of ethnographic work “is always to generate more questions that require interviews or more observations to explore” (p. 10); such tentative work means that researchers ideally delay first impressions and instead work heuristically, and this author applies this sense of discovery and willing suspension of subjectivities to the work of autoethnography, as well. When working digitally, these methods may remain the same or may undergo some subtle transformations. In autoethnography, similar approaches can be taken, though largely through an internal/reflective and reflexive process connected to the researcher/author as a central emic figure in the study.

The person is at the center of the web as data are collected along its many strands.