digital anthropology

LSE Digital Ethnography Collective Reading List

Collective Reading List on the topic of Digital EthnographyRead more

Postill (2016) "Doing remote ethnography"

"In this chapter I reflect on my experience of researching digital politics while physically absent from ‘the field’. I argue that there is nothing inherently inferior or illegitimate about researching local issues remotely (e.g. via Twitter, live streaming, web cam, email, online archives), or...Read more

Dagiral, Martin (2017) "Liens sociaux et numériques"

"Loin d’opposer la technique au social ou la matérialité à l’humain, ils [les liens sociaux numériques] montrent au contraire à quel point les techniques d’information et de communication (TIC) sont entrelacées dans les faits sociaux étudiés et qu’il serait vain de vouloir distinguer la...Read more

Golub (2010) "Being in the world (of Warcraft): Raiding, Realism, and Knowledge Production in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game"

"This paper discusses two main claims made about virtual worlds: first, that people become “immersed” in virtual worlds because of their sensorial realism, and second, because virtual worlds appear to be “places” they can be studied without reference to the lives that their inhabitants live in...Read more

Madianou (2015) "Polymedia and Ethnography: Understanding the Social in Social Media"

"In this essay I argue that social media need to be understood as part of complex environments of communicative opportunities which I conceptualize as polymedia. This approach shifts our attention from social media as discrete platforms to the ways users navigate environments of affordances in...Read more

Miller (2018) "Digital Anthropology"

1. "[...] populations and worlds that are largely the result of digital technologies."

2. "[...]use and consequences of digital technologies on diverse populations around the world.

3. "[...] the

...Read more
Locatelli (2017) "Images of Breastfeeding on Instagram: Self-Representaion, Publicness, and Privacy Management"

[...] Instagram appears, then, as a platform where personal choices and beliefs can flow into public discourse and a place for investigating how public discourses and social and cultural issues (such as breastfeeding promotion and representation) shape the way that breastfeeding is lived...Read more

Balleys, Coll (2015) "La mise en scène de la vie privée en ligne par les adolescents"

"Que recouvre la notion de vie privée dans les pratiques de sociabilité adolescente médiatisée ? Comment les adolescents fabriquent-ils une représentation de leur vie privée sur les réseaux sociaux, et selon quelles logiques ? Quelles sont les corrélations existant entre la mise en scène de la...Read more

Friedman (2005) "Armchair Anthropology in the Cyber Age?"

"I think the web is going to change anthropology in another way. I predict that we will slowly see the return of the “armchair anthropologists” Malinowski so famously dethroned."Read more

Goodwin-Hawkins, Gould (2020) "Fieldwork at sunset. Visual representations of anthropology online"

"This article analyzes online images of sociocultural anthropology across one hundred high-ranking universities worldwide. We show how, online, a discipline defined by diversity becomes readily reducible to “exotic” geographies and objectified “others.” [...]."

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Nardi (2015) "Virtuality*"

This review examines studies of the affordances of digital technologies that produce virtuality. What we can call a “technological turn” in the literature considers technology a first-order analytical object rather than blackboxing it or subsuming it under social process. J.J. Gibson’s original...Read more

Dalsgaard (2016) "The Ethnographic Use of Facebook in Everyday Life"

"[...] What types of field relations stem from such social media-driven ethnography? And what kinds of data do these relations present to the ethnographer? [...] I argue that ethnography is already in possession of the methodological tools critically to assess the validity and value of data...Read more

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