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Presentation: Cultural dimensions of digital ethics

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Budka, P. (2023). Cultural dimensions of digital ethics: Anthropological notes and perspectives. Presentation at Academies for Global Innovation and Digital Ethics (AGIDE) Workshop, Vienna, Austria: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 17-18 April.

From the AGIDE workshop brochure:

“The digital transformation is changing the way we live, the way our societies and economies function, and is shifting global power relations. Moreover, it has brought about an unprecedented degree of global interconnectedness. In cooperation with other Academies of Sciences worldwide, Academies for Global Innovation and Digital Ethics (AGIDE) seeks to embrace the socio-cultural variety of perspectives from all over the world and to further explore differences and similarities without forcing uniformity or consensus. The first AGIDE workshop will focus on the main questions of the project, that is, how various regions and cultures experience digitalization and whether particular ethical challenges arise due to various cultural dimensions. A series of renowned international speakers were invited to investigate, beyond stereotypes, in which ways cultural dimensions influence how technologies are welcomed, perceived and dealt with. Three main questions were were identified to guide the discussions at the workshop:

1) What is your vision of a ‘good digital future’ within your cultural context or region?

2) When you step out of the ‘bubble’ of the expert community, what are the views of lay people you meet ‘outside’?

3) What is the most annoying cultural stereotype with regard to approaches to digitization? Why do you find it annoying and what would you change about that stereotype?”

I commented on these questions by providing an anthropological perspective.

Blog Post: Collaborative ethnography in the digital age: Towards a new methodological framework

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Palmberger, M., & Budka, P. (2020). Collaborative ethnography in the digital age: Towards a new methodological framework. Digital Ethnography Initiative (DEI) Blog, 13 Nov.

Digital ethnography has become a very vibrant research field, as the growing body of literature indicates (e.g. Hjorth et al., 2017; Pink et al., 2016). Nevertheless, we sense that methodological debates often fall short. With this contribution to the Digital Ethnography Initiative (DEI) blog, we would like to open up a discussion on key methodological and ethical issues.

More precisely, we would like to start sharing a reflection process on theoretical and methodological debates in the field of digital ethnography that we have been engaging in over the last year. This resulted in (1) a project proposal to an Austrian funding body as well as (2) in the Digital Ethnography Initiative at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna that we launched together with our colleague Suzana Jovicic.

In this blog post, we propose and briefly discuss three key issues and questions that are related to the challenges of ethnographic research in times of increasing digitalization. They address

(1) the individualization of interaction via smartphones and other mobile devices, which is connected to

(2) new issues of confidentiality and intimacy that call for the development of

(3) explicit collaborative research methods involving research partners in the process of collecting, interpreting and representing data.

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Panel: Digital Ethnography: Revisiting Theoretical Concepts & Methodological Approaches

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Panel “Digital Ethnography: Revisiting Theoretical Concepts & Methodological Approaches” @ Vienna Anthropology Days 2020 (VANDA2020, Sept. 28 – Oct. 1), convened by Philipp Budka & Monika Palmberger.
More details, including the paper abstracts, to be found at https://vanda.univie.ac.at/scientific-program/.

Session 1

Rebecca Carlson (Temple University / TMDU): Online with bioinformatic scientists in Tokyo: Doing digital ethnography in a pandemic

Simone Pfeifer (Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz): Digital ethnography on, with, and through social media and messenger services: Ethical and methodological reflections from two different research projects

Monika Palmberger (University of Vienna): “New media of care”: Methodological reflections on digital diaries

Annika Richterich (University of Sussex): Critical making and digital ethnography

Franziska Weidle (Brandenburg University of Technology): Co-creating with software: Towards a computational correspondence in digital ethnography

Session 2

Cristiane Damasceno (UNC Greensboro): Innovative research methods for the disinformation age

Marie Hermanová (Czech Academy of Sciences): Too real is fake: Authenticity and digital intimacy between influencers and researchers

Christian Ritter (Tallinn University): Mediated relationships and remote ethnography: Following the rise and fall of travel influencers

Suzana Jovicic (University of Vienna): Neither here nor there: Smartphone in the ethnographic encounter

Libuše Veprek (LMU Munich): Bringing the subject into focus in large scale textual data analysis

Session 3

Maria Schreiber (University of Salzburg): #strokesurvivor: Studying a “hashtag public” on Instagram

Zoë Glatt (LSE): Becoming a YouTuber: (Auto)ethnographic explorations of the online video industry

Xiaowei Huang (Guangzhou College of Commerce): Second Life, ethnography and virtual culture

Philipp Budka (University of Vienna): Digital ethnography and web archives: The case of an indigenous web-based environment

Free video analysis tools

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Free video (& audio) analysis and transcription tools, partly collected via the VISCOM list serv.

Digital ethnography

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Digital ethnography – a selection of resources

e-Seminars of the EASA Media Anthropology Network:

Literature:

Ethnography in virtual worlds:

  • Boellstorff, et al. (2012). Ethnography and virtual worlds: A handbook of method. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ethnography and digital and social media:

  • Hjorth, L., et al. (Eds.). (2017). The Routledge Companion to digital ethnography, New York: Routledge. Forthcoming.
  • Miller, D., et al. (2016). How the world changed social media. London: UCL Press. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1474805/1/How-the-World-Changed-Social-Media.pdf
  • Pink, S., et al. (2016). Digital ethnography: Principles and practice. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
  • Postill, J., & Pink, S. (2012). Social media ethnography: The digital researcher in a messy web. Media International Australia, 145(1), 123-134. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1329878X1214500114
  • Sanjek, R., & Tratner, S. W. (Eds.). (2016). eFieldnotes: The makings of anthropology in the digital world. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Blog posts:

Research centres:

Review: Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte.

Review: Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte. published on No Comments on Review: Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte.

Budka, P. 2014. Review of Hess, S., Moser, J. & M. Schwertl (eds.). Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte. Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 2013; 332 pp. Anthropos, 109.2014/2: 694-696.

Mit dem Sammelband „Europäisch-ethnologisches Forschen. Neue Methoden und Konzepte.“ ist es den HerausgeberInnen und AutorInnen gelungen eine wichtige, und wie ich finde längst überfällige, Sammlung rezenter Methoden und theoretischer Konzepte nicht nur für die Europäische Ethnologie/Volkskunde zusammenzustellen. Auch wenn der Titel ein Naheverhältnis des Bandes und seiner Inhalte zur Europäischen Ethnologie nahelegt, ist dieses Werk durchaus auch VertreterInnen anderer kultur- und sozialwissenschaftlichen Disziplinen – von Kultur- und/oder Sozialanthropologie bis Soziologie – empfohlen. Insgesamt 17 AutorInnen geben in 12 Beiträgen einen einführenden Überblick zu methodischen und methodologischen Überlegungen sowie Konzepten, die in den letzten Jahren im einschlägigen wissenschaftlichen Fachdiskurs massiv an Bedeutung gewonnen haben: von Ethnographie und Feldtheorien über Akteur-Netzwerk-Theorie bis hin zur Analyse visueller und materieller Kultur. Im Folgenden will ich mich einer subjektiven Auswahl an Buchbeiträgen widmen, um so zu versuchen die Bandbreite dieses Werkes und seiner Inhalte darzulegen.

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