I started off the week in Cardiff (Monday and Tuesday) and found that I had more time to work on the course when I am running all day workshops away (as opposed in London where I live). That is because I can work on the train (ala Andy’s artefact) which I can’t do on the tube (ala my dystopic day artefact) and I can fill my empty evenings away with work/study.
Sian’s feedback was very helpful as it indicated that I was on the right track with the lifestream. It is useful to reflect back on the week as it is easy to forget, for example, what I bookmarked in Delicious and the range of things I explored. This week I finally figured out Tumblr and have added it to my lifestream. In previous posts I had mentioned that the work I did reading was not reflected in the lifestream. I was inspired by Sian/Jen’s original description of the lifestream as an adaptation of the 17th century practice of ‘commonplacing’ – where individuals collated sayings, quotes, proverbs, images and thoughts in a single scrapbook. I felt that the quotes bit was missing from my lifestream. I have started to use Tumblr as I read in order to extract key sentences that I want to reflect on in the reading.
So as the focus of this week turned to thinking about our virtual ethnographies we will each be conducting my lifestream reflects some of the tools I checked out for reporting the ethnography, some links to ethical issues including an IBM video on what they are doing about cryptography. I actually already had done some reading on internet ethics for a paper on Web 2.0 research which will be published in January. My focus then was on the analysis of data online of which there is little published (as opposed to conducting research online) but I had read some of that literature. Unfortunately what I read was not digital – I had to go to the British Library to read the material – so I couldn’t add it to the Delicious tag that Sian set up. But the issues I had focussed on were to do with privacy issues, ownership, copyright, security and the differing situation between the EU and the States. Ethical issues were brought up in the Discussion Board and I added my thoughts about that before Sian and Jen blogged about their guidelines which was helpful.
The most difficult decision for me was to decide on the topic of my virtual ethnography. I blogged about my indecision. I think I have decided now. The criteria I used was ethical considerations about choosing a site that was public, that people were aware and happy that their posts were online, and a site where I did not belong. For such a short study, I do not have the time to negotiate permissions and I was uncomfortable in doing so covertly – particularly as my presentation about the site would be so public. So that ruled out Methodspace – http://www.methodspace.com/ which was my first choice. I think I will look at Davidsfarm – http://www.youtube.com/user/Davidsfarm#p/a a YouTube phenomenon – and I will blog about that separately.
On the Discussion Board they was some talk about looking at a site vs community and what was a virtual community anyway. I found the Hine and Bell readings helpful in that respect as well as the examples of virtual ethnography that have been recommended in the reading.
By focusing on sites, locales and places, we may be missing out on other ways of understanding culture, based on connection, difference, heterogeneity and incoherence…the field site of ethnography could become a field flow, which is organized around tracing connections rather than about location in a singular bounded site. p. 61 Christine Hines
I like Hines’ notion of a ‘field flow’ rather than a ‘field site’ with a focus on connections. If I think of studying my own household it would be very limited if the focus was just on the physical house itself and its inhabitants. It would be missing the connections to my mother and brother in the States, my sister in Italy, my step-son in Epping and my step-daughter in West London – all of whom impact on my household relations.
the texts that consitute the shared space of [a virtual] community…’enable participants to imagine themselves part of the community’ Bell, D. (2001) citing Baym (1998:62) p. 102
In relation to online communities, I found the Baym quote which Bell cites very illuminating. The text of chat, comments etc. replies are ‘physical’ evidence of interaction, of a community which can be imagined.
I am not sure that Davidsfarm is a community but there is plenty of evidence for people to imagine it as one. And that is what I think I shall explore.
