"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
"Qualitative researchers struggle to study the transient fields of social network sites like Twitter through conventional ethnographic approaches. This paper suggests that, in order to step further, we should distinguish between the relatively stable ‘contextual’ fields of bounded online...Read more
"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
"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.” [...]."
"This review surveys and divides the ethnographic corpus on digital media into three broad but overlapping categories: the cultural politics of digital media, the vernacular cultures of digital media, and the prosaics of digital media. [...]"
On the growing importance of digital ethnography in anthropology studies.
Relying solely on physically co-present, non-digital fieldwork, or solely on telematics is still theoretically possible, but in most research settings it no longer makes sense to do so.Read more
This introduction will propose six basic principles as the foundation for a new subdiscipline: 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