Description
Book SynopsisSixteen scholars address the impact of digital technologies on how anthropologists do fieldwork and on what they study. Reflecting on fieldwork globally, they discuss shifting boundaries between home and field, ethics in online fieldwork, new forms of digital data and collaboration, and the future of fieldnote archiving.
Trade Review"Published in 1990, Roger Sanjek's landmark edited volume
Fieldnotes built on debates associated with
Writing Culture and other works of the time, exploring the often unacknowledged but pivotal role of fieldnotes in ethnographic research.
eFieldnotes, coedited by Sanjek with Susan Tratner, builds on that legacy with a new set of landmark essays on fieldnotes in the digital age . . . [that] push us to rethink the relationship between the empirical, methodological, and theoretical in ethnographic inquiry-in a context when the digital age threatens the methods and time frames of ethnography, yet simultaneously offers new opportunities for relevance and insight." *
Journal of Anthropological Research *
"The 15 articles offer richly nuanced readings of the changing nature of fieldwork and the variety of notes that arise from digital sources . . . A welcome addition to undergraduate and graduate courses on fieldwork methods . . . Highly recommended." *
Choice *
"From a well-argued exploration of historical continuities between practices and premises in the earlier world of fieldnotes and those characteristic of the current digital terrain, to a sophisticated, complex, and candid discussion of ethics in the broadest sense,
eFieldnotes is an extraordinarily interesting and worthy successor to the classic
Fieldnotes, and a lively set of provocations on its own." * Donald Brenneis, University of California, Santa Cruz *
Table of ContentsPreface
—Susan W. Tratner and Roger Sanjek
PART I. TRANSFORMATIONS AND CONTINUITIES
Chapter 1. From Fieldnotes to eFieldnotes
—Roger Sanjek
Chapter 2. Digital Technologies, Virtual Communities, Electronic Fieldwork: The Slow Social Science Adapts to High-Tech Japan
—William W. Kelly
Chapter 3. Changes in Fieldnotes Practice over the Past Thirty Years in U.S.
Anthropology
—Jean E. Jackson
PART II. FIELDWORK OFF- AND ONLINE
Chapter 4. The Digital Divide Revisited: Local and Global Manifestations
—Mary H. Moran
Chapter 5. Writing eFieldnotes: Some Ethical Considerations
—Mieke Schrooten
Chapter 6. Filesharing and (Im)Mortality: From Genealogical Records to Facebook
—Martin Slama
PART III. DIGITALLY Mediated Fieldwork and Collegiality
Chapter 7. Doing Fieldwork, BRB: Locating the Field on and with Emerging Media
—Jordan Kraemer
Chapter 8. "Through a Screen Darkly": On Remote, Collaborative Fieldwork in the Digital Age
—Jenna Burrell
Chapter 9. Being in Fieldwork: Collaboration, Digital Media, and Ethnographic Practice
—Heather A. Horst
PART IV. ONLINE FIELDWORK AND FIELDNOTES
Chapter 10. New York Parenting Discussion Boards: eFieldnotes for New Research Frontiers
—Susan W. Tratner
Chapter 11. When Fieldnotes Seem to Write Themselves: Ethnography Online
—Bonnie A. Nardi
Chapter 12. The Ethnography of Inscriptive Speech
—Graham M. Jones and Bambi B. Schieffelin
PART V. WIDENING COMPLEXITIES AND CONTEXTS
Chapter 13. Preservation, Sharing, and Technological Challenges of Longitudinal
Research in the Digital Age
—Lisa Cliggett
Chapter 14. Archiving Fieldnotes? Placing "Anthropological Records" Among Plural Digital Worlds
—Rena Lederman
Chapter 15. Digital Engagements: Fieldnotes and Queries for Anthropology Prompted by Iraqi Kurdistan in the Information Age
—Diane E. King
List of Contributors
Index
