Ethnographic blogging

[Owen Wiltshire]

Over the last few years more and more people have started blogging anthropology, and these blogs have taken on a number of forms. One of which is the research blog. Last year the Media Anthropology Network hosted a seminar on Erkan Saka's paper "Blogging as a Research Tool for Ethnographic Research" (2006).

At the time of the seminar, blogging was new enough that many reactions to the proposal were quite conservative. Many argued the public nature of a blog would violate confidentiality, and that standards would have to be developed if blogging were to be taken seriously as a research method. I have continued to explore blogging as a way to do ethnography.

I think a lot has changed in the past year, and I suspect some of the more conservative positions may take a turn for the more flexible. But who am I to say? So let's begin:

Just as there is no one way to blog, there is no one way to use a blog for ones research. It can be used to share information and as a way to collect information. My research strategy has centered on blogging as a way to generate discussion and to flush out interesting and relevant questions, interests, and concerns within the community (which happens to be us anthro's participating online).

By frequently posting about my research, in an engaged and biased manner, I've been able to elicit public responses to relevant research questions, while allowing people to decide how they want to be represented (giving the option to sign their response with a real name, or a fake one, or none at all). It gives control to ones collaborators, allowing them to represent themselves. The discussions exist as a public dialogue, that others can build on, benefit from, and respond to.

So my question, as this forum is probably not the place to post drafts of my thesis, deals with the issue of confidentiality and the possibility of doing ethnography based on publicly generated documents which involve a lot of back and forth conversation between researchers and those being researched. I'm not proposing that all research questions can be addressed this way, but rather that some can, and that this approach can answer numerous issues of representation that have plagued ethnography.

In his recent podcast on ethnography, Alexandre Enkerli, argues that ethnography is an approach rather than a method. Within the approach are numerous methods that can be adapted to particular research questions. So how does blogging fit in?


* Let people know what you are doing. When studying online communities, it is a way to participate within them as opposed to "trolling" the community secretly.

* Interact with bloggers to discover relevant and important issues/questions within a particular community.

* Ethnography is a writing process - blogging can help refine written arguments and representations.

* Ethnographers have been criticized for assuming too much authority - why not open your research to public discussion? Let people respond to your work, and build on it! Embrace criticism, don't hide from it.

* The media rarely shows interest in anthropological research, or gets it wrong when it does. This has a drastic effect on how communities will receive you! Why not represent yourself?

* Anthropologists often fail to protect informants confidentiality, why not let people represent themselves in public? Create a public document with the community, and build on that!

* Publishing takes time and it can drastically alter your work, imposing demands that do not work with the desires of the community you are involved with. Don't sell out the people involved in your research, blog what is important and publish what will get you a job.

-----------------

So what do you think? Is blogging an ethnographic approach? Are blog conversations valid documents to use as the bases of an ethnography? Can publicly generated documents answer numerous issues of representation and confidentiality that have plagued ethnography? Will publicizing your work early damage your ability to publish in the future? [think about all the arguments for blind peer review - if you blog it, they will know you wrote it!]

I'd love to know what you think.



-----------------

Feel free to check out my research blog at nodivide.wordpress.com, and to share your thoughts, concerns, reactions, criticisms, whatever. I like tangents and varieties and I don't care if you are long or short with your reply. Don't worry about being thoughtless or thoughtful, obnoxious or polite, just feel free to comment!

[John Postill]

Thanks for creating this thread, Owen. As you know I've been blogging more or less regularly about my research and scholarly interests for a bit over a year (although not always as often as I'd like to). I have found blogging to be a great way of:

* thinking aloud
* making notes to self
* bookmarking more selectively than with del.icio.us
* drafting seminar papers, articles, etc.
* being found by old friends and contacts, incl. from 'the field', who'd googled my name
* finding information, esp. from related blogs
* engaging with students, scholars and others, e.g. activists
* promoting my work
* keeping others updated about my work
* acquiring new (modest) technical skills
* feeling more confident about learning new Web platforms
etc

It's important to stress that research blogging doesn't have to be time-consuming. (As the old refrain goes: "Where do you find the time??"). The trick is to blog about things that you're working on anyway: you're making publicly available some of the materials and thoughts you're working with as part of your habitual research practice.

[Paul Wren]

How would you go about presenting this to an IRB? Would the IRB be involved? Not even sure what the right questions are for such a novel method.

Paul

[John Postill]

What's an IRB?

[Paul Wren]

In the United States, federal law requires that all research involving human subjects be reviewed and approved by an Institutional Review Board, with the aim to protect the rights and welfare of such research subjects.

I know I'm being a bit sovereign-centric here, but it is a non-trivial consideration in the States. Are there no such similar laws governing human subjects on other countries?

[Owen Wiltshire]

Thanks for contributing!

John, as you know, I've benefited from your blog already - and really appreciated your willingness to discuss your work with students. How do you feel about using a blog as a means of engaging communities involved in the research, and as a form of public engagement? Have you had many responses from non-academics? Non-anthropologists?

Blogging your research is a great way to share work within academia, and I think it's also a great way to share ideas with those outside academia. Julian Hopkin's blog, Anthroblogia, does a great job targeting non-anthros. One of his recent posts links to a research paper, where he writes "If you're a Malaysian blogger, or a blogger living in Malaysia, my research is about YOU!". He is using the blog to reach non-academic audiences, to gather feedback on his work, etc. He's participating and inviting participation, through his blog.


Paul,

I am proposing that a research blog can help with issues of confidentiality, by creating an open space that allows for various forms of feedback (anonymous or not).

In the ethics form I filled out, I said I would provide confidentiality forms for all interviews I held, and that I would not post those interviews online without separate permission.

The idea here is that on the blog I don't need a confidentiality form since people are consciously making the choice to make information public. [so they need to legally be able to make that choice... if your research involved children, you probably wouldn't use the blog to collect information].

I would sell an IRB on the idea that the blog would provide increased research transparency, and create a place for people (involved in the research, and other academics) to respond and contribute to the research as it develops.

[John Postill]

Hi Owen, you're asking excellent questions. This will sound like a cop-out, but I'm hampered by the lack of time to do more things with the blog like the ones you suggest. Occasionally I get non-academics commenting on items, e.g. when I've blogged about language and regional forms of nationalism in Spain, which is something unrelated to my current research but could become a future research topic.

So for now I'm keeping the blog low-maintenance and very close to the specialised research work I would be doing anyway. I always feel tempted to do more public anthropology but are thwarted by (or use the excuse of!) time constraints.

Many thanks for the Julian Hopkins ref, I know his blog but hadn't seen that item you mention.

[Julian Hopkins]

Hi and thanks for mentioning my blog. Coincidentally, I'm actually in the process of writing a conference paper on this very topic - so I've been thinking more about it recently.

I've tried to use the blog to get feedback from the bloggers I am concentrating on - the post you mention is actually a sticky post, it always stays on the top and therefore helps to fulfill the 'full disclosure' condition that ethics boards usually demand. Though if someone comes in through a permalink, from Google for example, they would not see this post. It has been looked at about 1700 times, and 15 comments have been left. Most comments address the questions and it has helped in providing some data about a particular ethical issue (whether or not I should ask permission to track a blogger). But one big question remains – what did the other 1600+ readers think?

Overall, I would like to get more feedback from bloggers - but so far I'd say the best feedback I've got is when I meet bloggers at blogmeets, or in formal face to face interviews.

Recently, I completed a survey on the Malaysian blogosphere, and wrote:
"I'll be happy to respond to any questions and requests for analysis on particular angles. For example, looking at the summarised results you can see that 54.2% of the bloggers that responded were female, and that 51.4% of the respondents are trying to make money from their blog; but you may want to know how many females were trying to make money compared to males. You can't tell that from the summary, but if you ask me I'll do my best to do the analysis for you and then put the results online..." (here)

So far, although the post has had 689 hits, no one has asked for anything specific.

So, my preliminary conclusions (and answering a bit your question "Are blog conversations valid documents to use as the bases of an ethnography?") are that it is worth the effort, enabling me to set out thoughts and get some feedback. The documents generated are completely valid additions to my fieldwork data, in my opinion: to be more precise, where I have had comments from bloggers, the complete document (post and comments) can be regarded as part of a dialogue between me the ethnographer and self-appointed respondent(s). However, even though I am dealing with bloggers who are completely familiar with the medium and regularly blog themselves about all types of topics, and leave comments in blogs, overall the blog by itself does not get enough feedback to stand alone as a data generating tool.

[Owen Wiltshire]

So when we talk about public engagement, blogging can help make ones research more transparent, and more accessible, but this doesn't always translate into "public interest". What would it take to generate more feedback through the blog?

Is it a matter of people not being interested in the questions anthropology focuses on? Or would you say the questions you are asking are interesting to those involved, and that they aren't leaving much feedback on the blog for other reasons?

[John McCreery]

Owen Wiltshire said:

Is it a matter of people not being interested in the questions anthropology focuses on? Or would you say the questions you are asking are interesting to those involved, and that they aren't leaving much feedback on the blog for other reasons?

Owen asks an excellent question, i.e., re those "other reasons." When I was being trained as an anthropologist, long ago, before many of those contributing here were born, we talked a lot about rapport. It was noted that there are many things that people are unwilling to talk about until they have formed a close relationship and feel that they can trust the person to whom they are speaking. Later, living and working in Japan, I noted the distinction in Japanese between honne (the real thing, how one really feels) and tatemae (the conventional, polite, politically correct thing to say). I noted how frequently foreign visitors were led astray by taking as genuine opinions conventional, acceptable notions normally used to deflect attention from genuine opinions.

Nothing specifically Japanese about this, of course. British and other forms of comedy are filled with examples of the difference between the polite phrase and the real intention being exploited to comic effect.

Blogs and responses to blogs strike me as a curious medium, filled with apparent openness that may, in fact, mask other thoughts and feelings tactfully or hypocritically concealed. In those good or bad old days in which the ethnographic interview was necessarily fact-to-face, there was body language to be considered, cross-checking with others familiar with the collaborator in question to get their slant on what was said, even at times genuine rapport. How do we get there on line with people we never see?

[Owen Wiltshire]

Yes, rapport plays a role in getting people to participate on a blog. When I first started the blog most of the comments came from people I had already established relationships with. Having a few close collaborators helps to get discussions flowing, which in turn gives other readers more to bounce ideas off. But rapport can also be developed in online contexts. Bloggers build such rapport through "pingbacks", referencing a discussion on another blog, and other collaborative strategies (blogrolls, rss feeds). By commenting on each others work bloggers develop rapport amongst each other, opening up a door for participation. Also by regularly writing on a blog, one develops rapport with readers who get a better idea where you are coming from [again depending on how you blog], which can both open up and limit the responses one gets.

As with all research, getting people to open up on a blog involves building some trust [and interest] - but blogging also opens up the door to anonymous participation, to people who might not open up otherwise. This isn't the same for everyone however, and I simply point out blogs provide this, where other methods might not.

As for blogs being a "... curious medium, filled with apparent openness that may, in fact, mask other thoughts and feelings tactfully or hypocritically concealed", I would say this about all social interactions, and that much of it isn't concealed at all. Misinterpretations happen all the time, but they also get worked out through dialogue [ie, blog spats spawning email exchanges where both parties work through an argument behind the scenes, invisible to other blog readers]. I don't think online interaction makes it impossible to interpret such interactions. Language issues pop up, just like in other forms of fieldwork. The openness comes from making the research accessible, to being honest with your research intentions and letting people know how the research is going. It does not mean that people will be more "open" in their response. Most people will not respond. Some will. Misunderstandings frequently occur, and are frequently worked out. Some things never get worked out [politics]. But within all this one can learn to interact and learn from people. A lot of this has to do with the questions being asked, and the way one goes about interacting with people.

Fact checking is one of the blogs strengths, again in some circumstances. Numerous times I've blogged about an essay I'd been incorporating into the thesis, and had the pleasure of having my interpretations corrected. Discussions also brew over periods, with an opinion being balanced with another six months down the road (or never at all).

Off to dinner so I've got to end here, but I'll try and organize a few references discussing online interaction and blogging - and to focus these thoughts linking research questions, public engagement, and blogging.

[Julian Hopkins]

I'm not sure what it would take to generate more interest. One possible avenue is based on an observation - the posts that get the most interest from 'my field' (of Malaysian blogging) are those that recount a blog meet. There may be a couple of reasons for this: it's a 'native practice' - it's something many bloggers do, and therefore people are more at ease with the format; the second, related, reason would be that the post will mention other bloggers, have links to them and photos of them, and therefore invites the others to reciprocate the social interest displayed.

The easiest way to generate more interest would probably be to play 'devil's advocate', and blog strongly held views about particular blogging practices and or blogger(s): i.e. bitch about something or someone. The problem with this would be that then you may alienate someone, or be seen as taking sides - so it's not really an option.

Basically, I think that many are not really interested in the anthropological questions, and even if they are, they may not feel qualified to answer and would worry about saying something perceived as ignorant.

As regards online vs. offline interactions:

Sometimes when I meet a blogger offline for the first time I find him/her to be less friendly than I expected, and sometimes one is able to continue online conversations and therefore don't need to break the ice. The interactions online are qualitatively different, and I would say that there is usually a lot more packed into a face to face interaction. But it's true to say that we are always performing whether online or off. Basically, they complement each other; somebody who's less confident may prefer to communicate online where they can consider their response more.

Finally, the nice thing about blogs and comments is that they are not necessarily one's final, definite, opinion; one is allowed to muse aloud and leave things hanging, like this... :)

[Keith Hart]

Hi Owen, A lot to chew on here.

I want to start with an anecdote: I studied the Tallensi of Northern Ghana made famous by Meyer Fortes. His field research took place in the mid-30s and his great monographs were published in the late 40s. He revisited the Tallensi in the early 60s, not long before my own fieldwork later that decade. On one occasion he was confronted by an angry young man waving one of his books: "How dare you describe my father in this insulting way?", he demanded. Fortes, especially in his first book, was keen to write about concrete people and places; his arguments became more abstract later. His comments were often direct. He told me, "If you had suggested to me then that the Tallensi would one day read my books, it would have been as strange as...you having to imagine the Tallensi founding a colony on the moon!"

In our pamphlet, Anthropology and the crisis of the intellectuals (1993), Anna Grimshaw and I dwell at length on how the project of scientific ethnography has been compromised by the shortening of time and distance in the twentieth century. We argue that the separation of "the field" and "writing up" encouraged bogus intellectual practices such as keeping a secret hoard of private fieldnotes and a lack of reflexivity in relations with those we study. Your example of ethnographic blogging just takes that process one step further. Perhaps you could be less deferential to the keepers of the traditional flame.

I often say that writing a thesis hinges on how you deal with two questions: what is the line of words from beginning to end and how do you choose what to keep in and what to leave out. Your public practice of involving the people you study in what you write breaks up the linearity, even if it doesn't abolish the final problem of the book form. The second question is intellectual and aesthetic, for sure, but above all it is about politics. The issue of 'confidentiality' is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything you write has political consequences, both actual and potential. I would go further, fieldwork results are determined more by the political choices you make on the spot than by any research design. All of this has been obscured by the attempt to construct an 'objective' academic discourse and call it "ethnography".