This special issue, guest edited by Crystal Abidin and Gabriele de Seta collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”. On the other, they evidence how doing ethnographic research about, on, and through digital media is most often a messy, personal, highly contextual enterprise fraught with anxieties and discomforts. Through the four “private messages from the field” collected in this issue, we acknowledge the messiness, open-endedness and coarseness of ethnographic research in-the-making.
About the journal
JDSR seeks to publish high-quality original research within all fields of social sciences interacting with digital issues. Social science is defined broadly to include, inter alia, sociology, informatics, pedagogy, education science, gender studies, law, economy, social work and geography. We welcome submissions from neighbouring research fields if they are relevant to a social science audience. Learn more →
JDSR is supported by a strong international editorial board of leading researchers in the field and is run by genuinely nice people.
Journal of Digital Social Research (JDSR) | ISSN (Online) 2003-1998
Published by DIGSUM (Centre for Digital Social Research), Umeå University, under the terms of a CC BY-SA License
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