post a draft of the digital ehtnography note

Author: denten

collections/_memos/3-ethno-guide.md

@@ -1,17 +1,266 @@
 ---
-title: "On Study Design in Computational Humanities"
-author: "Dennis Yi Tenen"
-date: "October 30, 2025"
+title: "What is Digital Ethnography? [draft]"
+author: "CUNIL"
+date: "December 29, 2025"
 documentclass: texMemo
 mainfont: "fbb"
-published: false
+published: true
 header-includes: |
   \usepackage{graphicx}
   \memoto{Recipient Name}
   \memofrom{Dennis Yi Tenen}
-  \memosubject{Memo 3: Digital Ethnography in the Shadows}
+  \memosubject{Memo 3: What is Digital Ethnography?}
   \memodate{\today}
   \memologo{\includegraphics[width=0.3\textwidth]{cunil-logo.png}}
 ---
 
-I
+What is digital in digital ethnography? Setting aside the long and over-theorized history of
+ethnography as method, this note advances a deliberately partial and pragmatic account of doing
+ethnographic work online. Our approach combines qualitative and quantitative techniques while
+extending observational fieldwork beyond interaction and representation to include media,
+software, and platform analysis as first-order objects of inquiry.
+
+## Ethnography
+
+To think clearly about ethnography online, it helps to be explicit about what ethnographic
+fieldwork ordinarily demands. For our purposes, ethnography organizes itself around at least
+three complementary imperatives under the umbrella of fieldwork: to observe, describe, and
+participate.
+
+These do not unfold sequentially. They operate as co-present demands, each shaping how the
+others proceed. Observation calls for attention, curiosity, patience, and an eye for detail.
+Description introduces judgment—questions of interpretation, selection, and even literary
+form. No matter how thick the description, it cannot capture the fullness of experience. An
+ethnographer’s gaze remains bounded by position and point of view. And yet, especially in the
+early stages of fieldwork, I often do not know what I am looking for. Details that later appear
+incidental or superfluous often enter the record without their significance yet being clear
+(Malinowski 1922; Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995).
+
+Description thus both exceeds and falls short of experience. It overwrites and underwrites
+at the same time, unfolding within a tension between what comes into view and what remains
+illegible, between what I notice and what only later coheres. Moving through familiar
+territory, smoothed and rendered invisible by repetition, I place myself deliberately in the
+position of a visitor—pretending to see things again for the first time, restoring a sense of
+friction and detail necessary for later analysis.
+
+Never definitive, ethnography records a singular encounter, awash in collective experience.
+This balancing act between subject and object demands participation. The observer cannot detach
+cleanly from what comes into view. To learn something about others requires stepping outside
+oneself; doing so entails exposure, complicity, and vulnerability. The line between subject and
+object blurs, but leaning too far to either side produces distortion. Complete identification
+courts hubris; claims of scientific detachment collapse under scrutiny (Clifford 1986; Marcus
+1995). Ethnographic observation proceeds in the tension between these positions, sustained
+rather than resolved.
+
+
+## Ethnography online
+
+Digital environments do not eliminate the imperatives of fieldwork; they redistribute them.
+Crucially, ethnographic practice no longer coheres around a shared material setting. The
+observed surface conditions online increasingly fall beyond reach, into media systems, software
+architectures, and platform infrastructures. Surface appearances may differ significantly
+from the conditions that make them possible, particularly under conditions of unequal access,
+platform opacity, and methodological constraint (Hargittai 2020).
+
+Online, observation rarely coincides with co-presence. Interfaces format what comes into
+view, platforms filter it, and computational systems constrain it in ways that remain largely
+inaccessible to both participants and observers. Participation likewise unfolds through
+accounts, avatars, metrics, and traces, often detached from the bodies that generate them and
+governed by rules enforced in code rather than articulated in practice. Description, in turn,
+confronts a field in which much of what structures social life operates below the threshold
+of perception. To describe online social life critically requires moving fieldwork beyond
+screen appearances to include the media, software, and platforms that actively delimit the
+possibilities of action, interaction, and meaning.
+
+In physical settings, the material properties of a specific place delimit the scope of
+ethnographic description. Consider a stadium sport. A football match unfolds within visible and
+shared constraints: the field, bodies in motion, and the published rules of the game. When that
+same game is played digitally, those constraints no longer coincide in the same way.
+
+The field persists as an image on screen, while its material instantiation—hardware, storage,
+and networked infrastructure—recedes from view. The body appears as a controllable avatar,
+governed by the physics of the game engine rather than the capacities of the player’s own body.
+What the avatar can do follows one set of constraints; what the player’s body can do follows
+another, shaped by interfaces, ergonomics, latency, and physical circumstance. Though the rules
+of the game remain legible, they now operate twice: once as an explicit system of play, and
+again as software code that enforces, supplements, and occasionally overrides them in ways
+opaque to both players and observers.
+
+In digital play, what appears unified in action no longer arrives as a single analytic object..
+Representation and constraint diverge, and the material conditions that organize action recede.
+from immediate observation The difficulty posed by this example is not that digital play      .
+lacks materiality, but that its material conditions no longer arrive together with their      .
+representations. The apparent unity of action must therefore be analytically delaminated if   .
+it is to be described at all. The task of digital ethnography is not simply to notice this    .
+separation, but to develop methods capable of tracing it                                      .
+
+At the level of representation, the digital football match presents itself at the surface:
+the camera angle, the movements of avatars, the scoreboard, the timing of actions and
+outcomes. Here, ethnographic practice remains closest to its familiar form. Description,
+close observation, and comparison still apply, drawing on long-standing traditions that treat
+representation as both a site of meaning and a problem of mediation (Geertz 1973; Emerson,
+Fretz, and Shaw 1995; Clifford 1986).
+
+At the same time, representation in digital environments arrives already structured as data
+(Shaw and Hill 2014, 2018). This condition invites the augmentation of description through
+computational analysis, not as a replacement for ethnographic judgment but as a means of
+extending it across scale and repetition (Yi Tenen 2017). Screen captures, replay files,
+logs, and interaction traces can be collected and compared systematically, allowing patterns
+to surface that remain invisible in isolated observation. Computational methods thus support
+ethnographic description by testing intuitions, surfacing regularities, and situating local
+observations within broader distributions of play.
+
+In practice, this may involve recording multiple matches, annotating moments of play, and
+comparing how similar situations unfold across players, teams, or difficulty settings.
+Screen captures, replay files, logs, and interaction traces can be collected at scale,
+allowing patterns to emerge that remain invisible in isolated observation—for example,
+recurring formations of play, timing asymmetries between players, or systematic differences
+in outcomes tied to camera perspective or interface feedback. Computational methods do not
+replace description; they extend it, enabling the ethnographer to test intuitions, surface
+regularities, and situate local observations within broader distributions of play.
+
+Moving beyond representation changes what counts as method as well as focus. The media systems
+that structure play—interfaces, controller mappings, camera logics, latency, matchmaking,
+ranking, and feedback mechanisms—rarely announce themselves in interaction, yet they shape
+it continuously. In developing this orientation, we were influenced by work in the Chicago
+school, beginning with Robert E. Park’s insistence that urban artifacts become institutional
+only insofar as they connect, through use and habit, to the “vital forces” of collective life
+(Park 1915). This attention to artifacts as lived infrastructure—tools that acquire social
+form through practice rather than design alone—carries forward in later work on infrastructure
+as relational, historically contingent, and often visible only at moments of breakdown or
+strain (Star and Ruhleder 1996; Bowker and Star 1999; Edwards 2003). At this level, ethnography
+therefore draws on tools from platform and software studies, attending to how interfaces,
+affordances, and technical systems organize perception, action, and beyond what is visible at
+the interface (Larkin 2013; Gillespie 2018).
+
+At this level, researchers might map interface elements and control schemes, documenting
+how different camera settings or controller configurations alter play, or comparing how the
+same actions register across platforms, game modes, or hardware setups. Researchers might
+deliberately vary settings, switch input devices, or repeat identical sequences of play under
+controlled conditions to observe how affordances shift. In some cases, this work extends to
+reading documentation, patch notes, or developer materials; in others, it requires forensic
+reconstruction through experimentation, reverse engineering, or systematic probing of system
+behavior. Social dynamics that appear interpersonal at the surface—cooperation, competition,
+reputation—often reflect the operation of ranking systems, feedback loops, or network effects
+that only become visible through such comparative and iterative analysis.
+
+Regulatory constraints introduce a further methodological challenge. In the digital football
+game, enforcement does not occur only through explicit rules of play, but through automated
+systems: anti-cheat mechanisms, matchmaking thresholds, penalty regimes, content moderation,
+and account governance. These systems shape outcomes unevenly and often opaquely, operating at
+a distance from both player intention and situated interaction.
+
+Our approach here was influenced by work that treats regulation not simply as formal law
+or stated policy, but as a distributed set of mediating practices that materialize through
+technical systems, routines of enforcement, and differential visibility (Clifford 1986;
+Rabinow 1977; Lessig 1999; Gillespie 2018). As with infrastructure, regulatory force often
+becomes ethnographically visible only in moments of intervention—through warnings, sanctions,
+exclusions, or sudden changes in access—rather than through everyday compliance. Attending to
+these moments allows ethnography to register how governance operates through code, platforms,
+and automated decision-making, even when it remains absent from the screen (Burawoy 1998).
+
+Methodologically, this can involve tracking how identical actions receive different responses
+across accounts, matches, or time periods; documenting instances of warning, penalty,
+suspension, or exclusion; or comparing player experiences before and after rule changes or
+platform updates. Researchers might collect and analyze policy documents, community guidelines,
+patch notes, and enforcement notifications, while also attending to their practical effects
+as they register in play. Patterns of reward, restriction, or suppression often become
+visible only through longitudinal observation and comparison—by following accounts over time,
+contrasting sanctioned and unsanctioned behavior, or tracing how reputational and ranking
+systems modulate access and visibility. Regulation rarely appears directly on screen, but its
+effects accumulate, shaping who can play, under what conditions, and which forms of action
+remain viable.’
+
+## Case Study: Library Genesis
+
+The layered approach outlined above emerges directly from our own ethnographic work. In what
+follows, we briefly revisit a concrete case study drawn from earlier research on Library
+Genesis, one of the largest “shadow libraries” in the world, to show how digital ethnography in
+practice already requires movement across representation, media, and regulation.
+
+Library Genesis (often abbreviated as Libgen) is a distributed digital library that aggregates
+and preserves millions of scholarly books and articles outside formal publishing and library
+infrastructures. Rather than treating the project as a site of piracy alone, our study
+approached it ethnographically—as a sociotechnical system composed of people, texts, software,
+and governance mechanisms, oriented less toward mass distribution than toward long-term
+preservation of knowledge (Yi Tenen and Foxman 2014). The analysis combined close qualitative
+observation with computational and infrastructural methods, making it a useful illustration of
+the approach sketched here.
+
+At the level of representation, the study began with what was immediately visible: catalog
+records, metadata fields, file formats, interfaces for search and download, and traces of user
+interaction. We collected and analyzed bibliographic metadata at scale, examining patterns of
+duplication, classification, and absorption across collections. Computational analysis made it
+possible to identify how texts circulated, how collections grew, and how “canonical” packages
+emerged over time—patterns that could not be inferred from isolated observation alone.
+
+Moving beyond representation required attention to media systems and software architecture.
+The organization of Libgen depended on specific technical choices: hashing schemes for
+de-duplication, database structures for indexing, forum software for coordination, and
+BitTorrent-based distribution for redundancy and resilience. Understanding how the library
+functioned meant reading documentation, examining code paths where possible, reconstructing
+workflows through forum archives, and tracing how infrastructural decisions shaped
+participation, authority, and access. What appeared as a single library interface in fact
+rested on a layered media ecology that structured what contributors could do and how the
+archive could survive.
+
+Finally, the study confronted overlapping regimes of regulation. Library Genesis operated
+under community rules governing contribution, curation, and quality control, alongside
+corporate enforcement by publishers and state-level legal pressure that periodically reshaped
+the system’s visibility and topology. These regulatory forces rarely appeared directly in
+everyday use, yet their effects accumulated over time—through takedowns, migrations, mirroring
+strategies, and shifts in governance. Tracing these dynamics required longitudinal observation,
+comparison across versions of the system, and attention to enforcement events as ethnographic
+data rather than external context.
+
+Taken together, the Libgen case illustrates how digital ethnography proceeds in practice: by
+moving deliberately across surface representation, mediating infrastructures, and regulatory
+constraints, and by augmenting participant observation with computational analysis, platform
+study, and infrastructural inquiry. Surface representations never exhaust the field. The task
+of digital ethnography lies in assembling descriptions thick enough to register the conditions
+that make such appearances possible.
+
+Dennis Yi Tenen
+Barbara
+Linda
+Jaehyo
+Olivia
+Aya 
+
+## Works Cited
+
+Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
+
+Burawoy, Michael. 1998. “The Extended Case Method.” Sociological Theory 16 (1): 4–33.
+
+Clifford, James. 1986. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press.
+
+Edwards, Paul N. 2003. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.” In Modernity and Technology, edited by Thomas J. Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, 185–225. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
+
+Emerson, Robert M., Rachel I. Fretz, and Linda L. Shaw. 1995. Writing Ethnographic Fieldnotes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
+
+Geertz, Clifford. 1973. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
+
+Gillespie, Tarleton. 2018. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
+
+Hargittai, Eszter. 2020. “Potential Biases in Big Data: Omitted Voices on Social Media.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 659 (1): 63–76.
+
+Larkin, Brian. 2013. “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure.” Annual Review of Anthropology 42: 327–43.
+
+Lessig, Lawrence. 1999. Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. New York: Basic Books.
+
+Marcus, George E. 1995. “Ethnography In/Of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-Sited Ethnography.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117.
+
+Malinowski, Bronisław. 1922. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge.
+
+Park, Robert E. 1915. “The City: Suggestions for the Study of Human Nature in the Urban Environment.” American Journal of Sociology 20 (5): 577–612.
+
+Rabinow, Paul. 1977. Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco. Berkeley: University of California Press.
+
+Shaw, Aaron, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2014. “Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production.” Journal of Communication 64 (2): 215–238.
+
+Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. 1996. “Steps Toward an Ecology of Infrastructure: Design and Access for Large Information Spaces.” Information Systems Research 7 (1): 111–134.
+
+Yi Tenen, Dennis. 2017. Plain Text: The Poetics of Computation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
+
+Yi Tenen, Dennis, and Maxwell Foxman. 2014. “Book Piracy as Peer Preservation.” Computational Culture 4.