Making the case for ethnography as a critical dimension in media and technology studies

Drawing on examples from my past and current research I will use this talk to both respond to recent provocations boyd and Crawford 2011 about the role of ΓÇbig dataΓÇ in human communication research and technology studies and outline the value of anthropology as a particular kind of ΓÇbig dataΓÇ that warrants more attention. I will walk through what I see as the different dimensions of social inquiry that fall under the rubric of ΓÇbig dataΓÇ to argue for attending to different kinds of data from the statistically to the ethnographically significant more collaborative approaches to how we arrive at what we think we know and critical analysis of the cultural assumptions embedded in the data we collect. By moving from the ΓÇsnapshotΓÇ of quantitative work to the ΓÇtime-lapse photographyΓÇ of ethnography I hope to persuade you that researchers who aspire to build technologies for human communication must imagine ΓÇbig dataΓÇ as an on-going process of modeling triangulation and critique. In short we must be as invested in pushing open new terrain for questions as we are in finding answers about what technologies mean to people in their everyday lives.,

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