Ethnography for a data-saturated world
Edited by Hannah Knox and Dawn Nafus
Book Information
- Format: eBook
- ISBN: 978-1-5261-2761-7
- Published Date: October 2018
- Series: Materialising the Digital
Description
This edited collection aims to reimagine and extend ethnography for a data-saturated world. The book brings together leading scholars in the social sciences who have been interrogating and collaborating with data scientists working in a range of different settings. The book explores how a repurposed form of ethnography might illuminate the kinds of knowledge that are being produced by data science. It also describes how collaborations between ethnographers and data scientists might lead to new forms of social analysis
Reviews
'Ethnography for a Data Saturated World is a must-read for researchers, students and professionals outside academia wishing to understand what digital data means for our contemporary world. It brings our attention to a burgeoning field of research and practice which unites ethnography and data science on a number of levels. This book takes us into the world of digital data in a mode and depth that only the particular sensibilities of ethnographic research can offer. Its editors and authors collectively provide a new and global vision through ethnographic studies of how the worlds of data scientists are constituted, the ways of knowing and forms of expertise that digital data analysis involves, and the methodological challenges and achievements of work that has created new modes of collaboration between ethnography and digital data analysis. Ethnography for a Data Saturated World is at once a substantive, theoretical and methodological book. It is brimming with significant ethnographic insights and findings about the worlds it examines, it offers an array of different and disciplinary specific modes of thinking theoretically about digital data from anthropology and sociology, and it interrogates the modes of knowing that are implicated in both digital data collection and analysis and in ethnographic practice, as well as the possible connections between them.'
Sarah Pink, Professor of Design and Media Ethnography, RMIT University
Contents
1 Introduction: ethnography for a data-saturated world - Hannah Knox and Dawn Nafus
Part I: Ethnographies of data science
2 Data scientists: a new faction of the transnational field of statistics - Francisca Grommé, Evelyn Ruppert and Baki Cakici
3 Becoming a real data scientist: expertise, flexibility and lifelong learning - Ian Lowrie
4 Engineering ethnography - Kaiton Williams
Part II: Knowing data
5 'If everything is information': archives and collecting on the frontiers of data-driven science - Antonia Walford
6 Baseless data? Modelling, ethnography and the challenge of the anthropocene - Hannah Knox
7 Operative ethnographies and large numbers - Adrian Mackenzie
Part III: Experiments in/of data and ethnography
8 Transversal collaboration: an ethnography in/of computational social science - Mette My Madsen, Anders Blok and Morten Axel Pedersen
9 The data walkshop and radical bottom-up data knowledge - Alison Powell
10 Working ethnographically with sensor data - Dawn Nafus
11 The other ninety per cent: thinking with data science, creating data studies - Joseph Dumit interviewed by Dawn Nafus
Index
Editors
Hannah Knox is Lecturer in Digital Anthropology and Material Culture at University College London
Dawn Nafus is Senior Research Scientist at Intel
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