Ethnography For The Internet

Module description

THIS MODULE IS OPEN ONLY TO STUDENTS STUDYING ABROAD AT KING’S COLLEGE LONDON FROM ONE OF THE FOLLOWING EXCHANGE PARTNERS:
• Università di Pisa
• Libera Universita di Lingue e Comunicazione IULM
• Universita delgi Studi di Siena
• Julius Maximilian University of Wurzburg


Ethnography has always been the in-depth, immersive study of peoples and their cultures. It is a methodology that is predicated on a researcher’s willingness to truly learn from a community through an array of theoretical perspectives and methods. Most importantly, the ethnographer wishes to fairly and ethically represent the communities they study. Within the context of the digital humanities, ethnography is well-positioned to help scholars gain insight into the different roles of digital technologies in the everyday lives of individuals and their (many) communities. This module will consider ethnographic methods within Kozinets’ (2015) idea of ‘netnography’. As Kozinets (2015, p. 80) has argued, 'Netnography begins and ends with an explicitly human window into the rich communicative and symbolic world of people and groups as they use the Internet, the Web, and social media, leaving its traces and transmissions for us to discover and decode'.

This module will focus on how ethnography has come to be practiced in the interdisciplinary field of digital humanities, considering the specific methods and theoretical positionings different digital contexts require. This module will begin with a look at the development of ethnography within anthropology, as well as how it eventually came to span different fields. It will next consider the theoretical and ethical concerns of this methodology as it went online. Finally, it will provide students with indepth, practical engagement with the methods of netnography, including: observation, interview, survey, textual analysis, etc.

Assessment details

Coursework

1 X 4000 word essay

Teaching pattern

10 x 1 hour lecture, 10 x 1 hour seminar

Module description disclaimer

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