The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography

With the increase of digital and networked media in everyday life, researchers have increasingly turned their gaze to the symbolic and cultural elements of technologies. From studying online game communities, locative and social media to YouTube and mobile media, ethnographic approaches to digital and networked media have helped to elucidate the dynamic cultural and social dimensions of media practice. The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, and conceptually cutting-edge guide to this emergent and diverse area.Features include: a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology; exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations; consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale; in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives.

Part I – Debating Digital Ethnography 1. Computers in/and anthropology: the poetics and politics of digitization 2. From virtual ethnography to the embedded, embodied, everyday Internet 3. Vectors for fieldwork: computational thinking and new modes of ethnography 4. A performative digital ethnography: data, design, and speculation 5. The fieldsite as a network: a strategy for locating ethnographic research 6. Remote ethnography: studying digital politics in Spain and Indonesia from afar 7. Mixing it: digital ethnography and online research methods—a tale of two global digital music genres Part II – Relationships 8. Small places turned inside out: social networking in small communities 9. "Doing family" at a distance: transnational family practices in polymedia environments 10. Researching death online 11. Relational labor, fans, and collaborations in professional rock climbing Part III – Visibility and Voice 12. "Our media"? Microblogging and the elusiveness of voice in China 13. Participatory complications in interactive, video-sharing environments 14. Influencer extravaganza: a decade of commercial "lifestyle" microcelebrities in Singapore 15. Nah Leavin’ Trinidad: the place of digital music production among amateur musicians in Trinidad Part IV – Place and Co-Presence 16. Locating emerging media: ethnographic reflections on culture, selfhood, and place 17. Making "ournet not the Internet": an ethnography of homebrew high-tech practices in suburban Australia 18. Locative mobile media and the development of unplanned, fleeting encounters with pseudonymous strangers, and virtual acquaintances in urban public places 19. Mobile media matters: the ethnography and phenomenology of itinerant interfaces 20. Placing mobile ethnography: mobile communication as a practice of place making Part V – Play 21. Digital gaming, social inclusion, and the right to play: a casestudy of a Venezuelan cybercafé 22. Kayfabe: an indepth look at WWE and its fandom using digital ethnography 23. Running, gender, and play with Zombies, Run! 24. Hands between the worlds Part VI – Arts 25. Reflections on teaching and displaying with the help of emerging technologies 26. The art of play: ethnography and playful interventions with young people 27. The (be)coming of selfies: revisiting an onlife ethnography on digital photography practices 28. Mobile filmmaking 29. Curating digital resonance Part VII – Infrastructures 30. Instant archives? 31. The fortune of scarcity: digital music circulation in Cuba 32. An infrastructural approach to digital ethnography: lessons from the Manchester Infrastructures of Social Change project 33. Riding the rails of mobile payments: financial inclusion, mobile phones, and infrastructure 34. Polar infrastructures Part VIII – Politics 35. Digital ethnography of mobiles for development 36. Mediated political agency in contested Africa 37. Ethnography beyond and within digital structures and the study of social media activism 38. The search for Wikipedia’s edges 39. Environmental sensing and control Part IX – Design 40. The politics of design, design as politics 41. Ethnography and the ongoing in digital design 42. Disruptive interventions with mobile media through Design+Ethnography+Futures 43. More-Than-Human Lab: critical and ethnographic experiments after human exceptionalism 44. Using fiction to explore social facts: the Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology

Larissa Hjorth is Distinguished Professor and Director of HDR in the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT University and was co-founding (with Professor Heather Horst) Director of RMIT’s Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC). Heather Horst is Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University and Director, Research Partnerships in the College of Design and Social Context at RMIT University. She was the director of DERC from 2012-2015. Anne Galloway is Senior Lecturer in Culture+Context Design at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Genevieve Bell is currently a Senior Fellow and Vice President at Intel Corporation where she works in their Corporate Strategy Office, driving long-term strategic visioning and insights.