Volunteer Science

DEWG has been working with Volunteer Science to create and pilot services to support digital ethnographic research and digital methods (e.g., visual surveys that incorporate images from social media). Members of the DEWG pilot group are using Volunteer Science to enable research tasks and to help facilitate recruitment and manage communication with study participants. The pilot group will explore how Volunteer Science can be used for participant observation of digital spaces in addition to conducting cognitive or think aloud protocols while a participant is online on their device.

International Communication Association Blue Sky Workshop Paris, May, 2022

This Blue Sky Workshop convenes digital ethnographers from around the world to share insights, lessons learned, and reports from the field at a time of unprecedented fieldwork challenges and opportunities. Both established and emerging digital ethnographers are welcome to attend. We aim to stimulate and support the emergence of a robust network of international ethnographers, doctoral students, postdocs, and junior faculty working on the communicative dimensions of digital ethnography.

At issue are questions of what “the field” looks like in a late- or post-pandemic era. How have principles of access, proximity, trust and disclosure been reshaped or transformed in this new global imaginary of social connections and distancing? What kinds of relationships and protocols are required or allowed in digital ethnography today? What new tools and techniques are available to digital ethnographers, and which older tools and techniques can be reconstituted or abandoned? How have emergent digital ecologies affected lived experience? And how might these questions and issues provoke new understandings of self, society and connectedness?