In the first months of the global, COVID-19 pandemic, SC&I Associate Professors Jeffrey Lane and Melissa Aronczyk established a new hub of scholars at Rutgers University who aim to develop the principles, practices, and ethics of digital ethnography and multimodal methods of doing fieldwork.   

The mission of the hub, named the Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group (DEWG), according to the groups’s website, “. . . is to develop a deeper understanding of how people live in this digital era and uncover the most innovative methods to study digital communication, information, and media firsthand. To establish SC&I at the forefront of digital ethnography, this working group provides outstanding support, training, and visibility to faculty and graduate students interested in this evolving research area.”

Lane and Aronczyk, as co-chairs, established DEWG during the stay-at-home orders of the pandemic, and Lane said they are now working to advance the practice of ethnography in today’s “somewhat more open-ended digital times.”

DEWG hosted its first virtual event on June 19, 2020, "Workshop on Fieldwork in the Time of COVID-19," to address the research opportunities and challenges arising from the pandemic, including restrictions on in-person fieldwork. Seventeen doctoral students and faculty from multiple units at Rutgers participated in the workshop. Since then, DEWG has expanded its membership—39 current members from Rutgers and other universities—and programming. In addition to regular, weekly writing groups and internal meetings for its members, DEWG hosts three virtual events per semester that are open to the public. These public events include book talks, panels on ethnographic methods, and workshops. Attendance at some of these events has been in the hundreds, with scholars and students from across the globe. 

More recently, Lane said, he and Aronczyk have convened a steering committee at SC&I of  Assistant Professors Caitlin Petre and Yonaira Rivera, and Ph.D. students Holly Avella and Niki Natarajan, to examine and advance ethnography and support scholars at SC&I, Rutgers, and those at other institutions, who are conducting ethnographic fieldwork.

Having already expanded beyond Rutgers, DEWG includes scholars from the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, the University of South Carolina, as well as SC&I alumnus Christoph Mergerson Ph.D.’22, who is an assistant professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland.

Read our Q&A below with Lane to learn more about DEWG and why the hub’s work is of critical importance and relevance to scholars and the general public alike.  

What are some of the challenges DEWG is addressing?
One critical challenge that members of DEWG have taken up that I’ve been writing about revolves around just how important is it that the inherent awkwardness and inconvenience of ethnography remain in the context of datafication, digitization, and digital ethnography. The Internet with the data tools we have affords access/insights into all sorts of communities, groups, cultures, discourses, symbols, and so forth — it’s a smorgasbord of peoples and their trace expressions and behaviors made available intentionally or unintentionally. So much is public, so much is out there even on populations that have been called sensitive, vulnerable, or hard to reach. But while we can collect data on all kinds of groups and communities, we have to ask ourselves: What are we really getting back? How is this trace data any more than itself, more than its face value?

What overarching questions is DEWG asking and why?

I’d argue what we really want is the people behind these traces so we can then find out: What are these things that are being said or left on the internet? How do these data fit into any actual lives? 

We want to bring the people back to their data for lots of reasons. From DEI+A standpoint, we haven’t included anyone else’s perspective yet if we’re just processing their digital data. Scraping data might be especially dubious territory for us since we know that the poor and minoritized groups are disproportionately surveilled by state and market institutions, from law enforcement to the welfare state to predatory businesses to data brokers of various stripes. We don’t want to position ourselves in the same way as these other invisible audiences who do not (a) discuss openly the extent, nature, and the ends of data collection or (b) seek people’s input into the meaning of the data they’ve collected. 

What is the alternative to how state and market institutions collect data?

Ethnographers can do the opposite of these state/industry practices by making an effort to talk to the people they’re interested in, saying why they’re interested, and finding a way to be part of these digital networks (however conditionally). This way there’s a relationship to the community and a way to collect and interpreting people’s data with them. And that’s why ethnography is awkward and inconvenient—and why these aspects of the craft are even more important with datafication and digitization. We have all this data that’s floating out there that needs an anchor in the people that the data pertain to. 

Are there challenges specific to the practice of ethnography?

Ethnography is difficult because ethnographers are asking to observe and possibly be part of routines and schedules that are not their own.

Ethnographers ask not only to talk with people about their lives, but to join them in some way as they go about living them. We’re trying to negotiate a way to see the situations people are in for the purpose of research. What a hard set of conversations to have! How awkward an approach to gathering data! How inconvenient to meet people where they are! But if an ethnographer is granted such access—and often people are generous and want to be understood—then we have a chance to contextualize what people say and do online and to create the data and analysis together.      

How will DEWG impact research at SC&I, Rutgers, at other institutions?
The challenge or the invitation here for the research conduct of any scholar using digital or computational methods is to ask ourselves how can we include perspectives beyond those most readily available? What if we treat digital data as unfinished and not something we can finish on our own because we need the people behind it? In other words: How can we make data collection a bit more awkward and inconvenient? That ethnographic warrant connects and drives the work at DEWG — it’s what our members are grappling with and addressing. 

Learn more about the Rutgers Digital Ethnography Working Group (DEWG), on the website and the Rutgers School of Communication and Information on the website.  

Photo credit: Associate Professor Jeffrey Lane