"genre of writing that uses fieldwork to provide a descriptive study of human societies. Ethnography presents the results of a holistic research method founded on the idea that a system's properties cannot necessarily be accurately understood independently of each other."In practice, ethnography is learning how to look at, talk about and transcribe data (in this case, pictures, audio, and video) in ways that reveal patterns, regularities, causalities, etc. that tell us something about the system.
While ethnography has traditionally been a tool for anthropologists, both anthropology and ethnography are now being used to look at cognition and cognitive systems (yay!).
Here's a really brilliant presentation, given by Michael Wesch to the Library of Congress, showing what ethnography can reveal about the cultural and social properties of YouTube.
3 comments:
thanks for the fascinating look into the culture of youtube. pretty inspiring.
yeah, I was really stoked to find something so close to home.. usually anthropologists are studying obscure cultures, but this is something we all have experience with.
Very thought provoking indeed
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