Paper Reading #19 : Reflexivity in Digital Anthropology

Author
Jennifer Rode

Occupation

Jennifer Rode is currently an Assistant Professor at Drexel's School of Information in Pennsylvania.  She is also a fellow in Digital Anthropology at University College London.  She holds her PhD from the University of California, Irvine

Location

Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems at NYC

Summary
Hypothesis
The author believes that digital anthropologists can participate in the HCI field by writing reflexive ethnographies

Method
The author merely discussed the different aspects of ethnographic views. There was no actual research done to develop a specific product.

Result
The author claims that the job of digital anthropologists is to study the context of technology not studying technology. She clarified the various methods of ethnographic study and names several styles of writing: realistic, confessional, and impressionistic

Content

The mentions the various forms of ethnography and how reflexive based ethnography can help promote design and theory in the field HCI. There is a description on three different types of anthropological writing and the important elements of that technique. There is also a mention of how ethnographies are actually used in the HCI design process.

• Positivist: Data is collected, studied, and tested with the aim of producing an unambiguous result.  
• Reflexivity:  According to Burawoy, reflexivity embraces intervention as an opportunity to gather data, it aims to understand how the data gathering impacts the data itself, and reflexive practitioners look for patterns and attempt to draw out theories. 
• Realistic: 
  the need for  experimental author(ity), its typical forms, the native’s point of view, and interpretive omnipotence.
• Confessional: 
  broadly provides  a written form for  the  ethnographer  to  engage  with  the  nagging doubts surrounding the study and discuss them textually with the aim of demystifying the fieldwork process
• Impressionistic: based on dramatic recall and a well told story.

Discussion
This paper was very different but i was still interested mostly because we are all working on our ethnography as well. I thought that some of the material the author talked about can be applied to our own personal projects in this class.