‘Piling on layers of understanding’: the use of connective ethnography for the study of (online) work practices

Abstract

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.

Online Communication and Everyday Life: Female Social Audience and Tv Fiction

“…Neither are female cultural identities used in a political sense or as a claim. Rather, participation is an extension of their offline identity, without apparent conflict (Dirksen et al, 2010). In this regard, it can be said that the interventions reflect instead the coming together of individual positions (Sandvoss, 2013, p. 286) within the logic of a participative culture rather than a defined political action.…”

Talking Suicide

“…The data collection process is comparable to what is referred to as "virtual ethnography", which often combines a range of methods in order to comprehend the values and practices of the studied group (Sundén 2002;Kanayama 2003;Dirksen et al 2010;Farnsworth & Austrin 2010). Flick (2009: 272) suggests that the Internet can be studied as "[...] a form of milieu or culture in which people develop specific forms of communication or, sometimes, specific identities.…”

Mixed Methods and Multimodal Research and Internet Technologies

“…As these latter examples from Dirksen et al (2010), Markham (2012) and Geiger and Ribes (2011) show, some Internet researchers from largely qualitative traditions may thus have adopted larger scale approaches, but they have done so because these are seen as appropriate adaptations to the circumstances they find rather than because these large scale approaches are seen as somehow inherently better than small scale qualitative research. boyd and Crawford (2011) argue that there are concerns that "big data" approaches may come to dominate the research landscape as appearing inherently more informative, and this "scaling up" may instead entail loss as well as gain in terms of our understanding of social phenomena.…”

“…Howard's (2002) sequential understanding of the mixing of methods in online ethnographic work with social network analysis as the preliminary step is only one of the possible models for understanding how the different methods combine. Dirksen et al (2010) describe a somewhat different model in their study, which used social network analysis of log files from a company Internet to enable them both to interpret qualitative data and to target their detailed attention to various online and offline sites. Researchers even vary in the extent to which they see different forms of analysis as separable and distinct.…”

“…Some forms of data, by contrast, are amenable to large scale analysis but can be harder to come by. For example, access to institutional intranets, or log files of internal communications such as used by Dirksen et al (2010) requires negotiation with stakeholders. Whilst the Internet does promote the use of "big data" approaches as a complement to qualitative studies, then, it does depend on the individual research object whether this big data is readily accessible or not.…”