This article explores the notion of connective ethnography as a modern form of ethnography. In the concept of connective ethnography presented in this article, the sensitivity to ‘the making of context’ includes both the sense of a local physical context as well as the increasing connections between information resources in the form of people, systems and texts. Based on the empirical material of a study conducted on the appropriation of virtual community in a corporate setting, a specific combination of online and offline methods and the data they together generate are evaluated for capturing the dynamics of online social practices. In doing so, special attention is paid to the application of social network analysis to online (log file) data.
A great deal of the literature on virtual communities evolves around classifying the phenomenon1 while much empirically constructive work on the topic has not been conducted yet. Therefore, the research discussed in this paper proposes to explore the actual field of the virtual community (VC). By means of a comparative ethnographic research, virtual communities are to be defined in terms of their inherent social activity, the interaction between the groups of people and the information and communication technology (ICT), and the meanings attached to it by its members. This chapter will report on the initial propositions, research questions and approach of the explorative research of working towards a “workable definition” of virtual communities. It will also present its “work to be done” which will ultimately form the basis of moving beyond defining virtual communities, i.e., actually designing and deploying one.
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