Forum: Qualitative Social Research is an open-acces and free-download online journal connected with Freie Universität Berlin (Open University in Berlin, Germany). FQS is a peer-reviewed multilingual online journal for qualitative research established in 1999. FQSthematic issues are published tri-annually. Each number is divided into FQS Reviews, FQS Debates, FQS Conferences and FQS Interviews.
In 2007 Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research devoted one of its volumes to virtual ethnography
In the volume devoted to virtual ethnography you can find (and download) articles:
Virtual Ethnography by Daniel Domínguez Figaredo, Anne Beaulieu, Adolfo Estalella, Edgar Gómez, Bernt Schnettler, Rosie Read
An introduction to the whole thematic volume
On New Means or New Forms of Investigation. A Methodological Proposal for Online Social Investigation through a Virtual Forum by Rubén Arriazu Muñoz (in Spanish)
Abstract: Processes and instruments of communication have constituted an important object for Internet researchers, and have been investigated using qualitative methodologies in social research. The most common strategy has been to adapt orthodox instruments and procedures to the virtual context. In this paper I address the following questions in order to develop a framework for virtual research. Using a virtual forum as starting point, I ask: Is virtual research a new taxonomy or an extension of conventional social research techniques? Is virtual research located at the same level as face-to-face research? Is it a new communicational research form? This paper presents a methodological approach using virtual forums as tools where asynchronous communication flows. I analyze the use of virtual forums in interaction with the social context, and articulate the method that emerges from this fieldwork situation.
Riereta.net: Epistemic and Political Notes From a Techno-Activist Ethnography by Blanca Callén, Marcel Balasch, Paz Guarderas, Pamela Gutierrez, Alejandra León, Marisela Montenegro, Karla Montenegro, Joan Pujol (in Spanish as well)
Abstract: In this article we report on an ethnographic research experience on Riereta, a techno-activist workshop located in Barcelona, where free software and other technologies are developed and put at the disposal of other political projects and activist collectives. Through our research experience, we answer some methodological issues but also raise related epistemic and political questions: What kind of methodical tools must we implement in order to experience the semiotic and material dimension of the subject? How to introduce the technology in our research activity? What kind of methodology can we develop if we want to be consistent with participants' wishes and ways of life? or How to take account of multiple and different voices that compose every ethnographic comprehension and creative practice? All of these questions could be summarized as an quest for turning social research and ethnographic practice into techno-political action. The article is organized in three parts: 1) the relationship between research subjects and objects variously constituted, shifting from a co-research perspective to an epistemologically articulated one; 2) the methodology applied, close to a performative and virtual ethnographic perspective where some technological tools, such as Tiki-Wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TikiWiki), are used; and 3) the products of the research process: collective and situated understandings of technoactivism.
Field Ethics: Towards Situated Ethics for Ethnographic Research on the Internet by Adolfo Estalella, Elisenda Ardèvol (in Spanish)
Abstract: This article reflects openly on the decisions that researchers have to deal with when undertaking qualitative research, especially ethnography, on the Internet. Our argument takes as starting point the ethical guidelines already developed for human subject research, and the way Internet researchers have tried to adapt these guidelines to their field. We argue that many of these ethical recommendations for researching the Internet have been designed according to specific applications (a chat, a mailing list, a blog, etc.), conferring specific properties to technology and making inferences about the kind of interaction that is taking place through such devices (public or private, for instance). We question these approaches and consider that the attribution of properties to technology restricts the scope of the ethical decisions that the researcher can make. We advocate a dialogical and situated ethical practice that takes into account every particular context when making any ethical decision during research. In line with this proposal, we report some ethical dilemmas that we have had to face in our own fieldwork on blogging practices among Spanish bloggers. We also draw on our experience of creating a "field blog" as part of our research. We describe three axes that have helped us to guide our ethical decisions in the field: the scope of individual data collected for participants in the course of research, the explicit and open presence of the researchers, and the search for symmetry and mutuality with our respondents in the field.
Mobile Subjects, Mobile Methods: Doing Virtual Ethnography in a Feminist Online Network by Michaela Fay
Abstract: In this article I give an account of my cyberethnographic study of the International Women's University "Technology and Culture" (ifu) 2000 and the network its participants formed in the ifu's virtual extension, vifu. The article offers a description of the methodological considerations and challenges I was confronted with whilst carrying out this research. In addition, I explore these methodological considerations on a conceptual level. Primarily concerned with questions of home and belonging and the question of how these notions figure in contemporary mobile lives, I explore here how conducting online research became the only possible method to adequately reflect the "mobile" nature not only of the event ifu and its virtual extension vifu, but also the ways in which participants negotiate belonging and mobility in their respective worlds and to the (v)ifu network.
Logging into the Field—Methodological Reflections on Ethnographic Research in a Pluri-Local and Computer-Mediated Field by Heike Mónika Greschke (in German)
Abstract: This article aims to introduce an ethnic group inhabiting a common virtual space in the World Wide Web (WWW), while being physically located in different socio-geographical contexts. Potentially global in its geographical extent, this social formation is constituted by means of interrelating virtual-global dimensions with physically grounded parts of the actors' lifeworlds. In addition, the communities' social life relies on specific communicative practices joining mediated forms of communication with co-presence based encounters. Ethnographic research in a pluri-local and computer-mediated field poses a set of problems which demand thorough reflection as well as a search for creative solutions. How can the boundaries of the field be determined? What does "being there" signify in such a case? Is it possible to enter the field while sitting at my own desk, just by visiting the respective site in the WWW, simply observing the communication going on without even being noticed by the subjects in the field? Or does "being in the field" imply that I ought to turn into a member of the studied community? Am I supposed to effectively live with the others for a while? And then, what can "living together" actually mean in that case? Will I learn enough about the field simply by participating in its virtual activities? Or do I have to account for the physically grounded dimensions of the actors' lifeworlds, as well? Ethnographic research in a pluri-local and computer-mediated field in practice raises a lot of questions regarding the ways of entering the field and being in the field. Some of them will be discussed in this paper by means of reflecting research experiences gained in the context of a recently concluded case study.
Ethnography of Online Role-Playing Games: The Role of Virtual and Real Contest in the Construction of the Field by Simona Isabella
Abstract: This paper invites the reader into the world of MUDs (Multi User Domains). Its underlying goal is to analyse certain social challenges associated with computer mediated communication (CMC), specifically with respect to the concept of the game; the process involved in the construction of the online Self or personality, potentially perceived as the final culmination of the frequent "comings and goings" between the game and reality; the concept of community that develops between two different frames—the virtual world and the real one; and, finally, the concept of both online and offline "experience". The empirical research, focusing on a comparison between an Italian and a Canadian MUDs interactive game, used online ethnography as the basic premise of study and biographical interviews with the players themselves, as further validation of the phenomenon. A fundamental question faces a researcher when conducting the study of a MUD—is the online game the only realm to consider? What is the impact of a multitude of other media (Instant messaging, boards, e-mails, SMS etc.) used by mudders to communicate in order to organize the game and become familiar with each other? Is it necessary for a researcher to totally abandon the players' social premise even if s/he is focusing her/his research on online relationships? These are some of the questions this paper endeavours to answer, while also being cognizant of the methodological problems researchers encounter when studying the Internet, both as a medium (of communication) and as a research framework.
How Did I Get to Princess Margaret? (And How Did I Get Her to the World Wide Web?)
by Kip Jones
Abstract: The paper explores the growing use of tools from the arts and humanities for investigation and dissemination of social science research. Emerging spaces for knowledge transfer, such as the World Wide Web, are explored as outlets for "performative social science". Questions of ethnics and questions of evaluation which emerge from performative social science and the use of new technologies are discussed. Contemporary thinking in aesthetics is explored to answer questions of evaluation. The use of the Internet for productions is proposed as supporting the collective elaboration of meaning supported by Relational Aesthetics. One solution to the ethical problem of performing the narrations of others is the use of the writer's own story as autoethnography. The author queries autoethnography's tendency to tell "sad" stories and proposes an amusing story, exemplified by "The One about Princess Margaret" (see http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/rt/suppFiles/281/618). The conclusion is reached that the free and open environment of the Internet sidelines the usual tediousness of academic publishing and begins to explore new answers to questions posed about the evaluation and ethics of performative social science.
Developing Cyberethnographic Research Methods for Understanding Digitally Mediated Identities by Natalia Rybas, Radhika Gajjala
Abstract: In this essay, we discuss the production of subjectivities at the intersection of local/global and online/offline environments through an engagement with the contexts ethnographically, to illustrate a methodology based on epistemologies of doing. We suggest that researchers studying the production of identity in technospaces must engage in the production of culture and subjectivity in the specific context while interacting with others doing the same in order to gain a nuanced understanding of how identities are formed and performed in such socio-economic environments. Identities thus produced are central to the workings of community situated in specific social, economic and cultural practices and structures of power. Through examining practices that shape these identity formations within various technological environments, we can work towards developing theoretical frameworks that actively shift hierarchies of oppression.
The Internet as a Library-Of-People: For a Cyberethnography of Online Groups by Maurizio Teli, Francesco Pisanu, David Hakken
Abstract: The concept "cyberethnography" remains undefined in the social sciences while, at the same time, still overlapping too much with the more well-known concept of "virtual ethnography." The aim of our paper is to remedy this situation by underlining new directions in the ethnographic study of computer mediated settings. To do so, we define cyberspace as computer-mediated contexts intrinsically related to supposed-to-be "real" places. From this point of view the ethnography of online groups is not just the ethnography of the groups online (or the online ethnography of groups), but it is both the ethnography of online and related off-line situations, the ethnography of humans and non-human actors in these related fields. It is hybrid, like a cyborg. In a word, it is a cyberethnography. In the first part of the paper, we discuss linkages between classical ethnography and its cyber developments. In the second part, we ground epistemologically the argument in favor of a robust social concept of "cyborg" drawing mainly from the fields called Science, Technology and Society (STS), and Organization Studies (OS). In the third part, we focus our argument on web-based group issues, using field data from our own research to define this kind of group and propose a metaphor, "the Internet as a library-of-people." This metaphor, which is strictly grounded in the cyborg concept, highlights the cyborgic characteristic of society that arises in research practice.
