Paper Reading #19 : Reflexivity in Digital Anthropology

References
     Reflexivity in Digital Anthropology by Jennifer A. Rode.  Published in the CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems.


Author Bio
     Jennifer Rode is currently an Assistant Professor at Drexel's School of Information in Pennsylvania.  She is also a fellow in Digital Anthropology at University College London.  She holds her PhD from the University of California, Irvine.

Summary

• Hypothesis   Rode believes that digital anthropologists can contribute to the field of HCI by writing reflexive ethnographies, which is different from other more positivist approaches.

• Methods  -  This paper was more of a discussion than an actual research and development project, so the author did not have any methods to present.   

• Results  -   The author posits that digital anthropologists are not studying technology, but rather studying in the context of technology.  She also clarifies some of the traditional approaches to ethnographic study, namely Positivist versus Reflexivity.  In addition to the approaches, she described some of the writing styles, specifically Realistic, Confessional, and Impressionistic. 
• Positivist: Data is collected, studied, and tested with the aim of producing an unambiguous result.  
• Reflexivity:  According to Burawoy, reflexivity embraces intervention as an opportunity to gather data, it aims to understand how the data gathering impacts the data itself, and reflexive practitioners look for patterns and attempt to draw out theories. 
• Realistic: 
  the need for  experimental 
  author(ity), its typical forms, the native’s point of view, and interpretive omnipotence.
• Confessional: 
  broadly provides  a written 
  form for  the  ethnographer  to  engage  with  the  nagging doubts surrounding the study and discuss them textually with the aim of demystifying the fieldwork process
• Impressionistic: based on dramatic recall and a well told story.

• Content  -  The author showed how ethnography has various forms and orientations, and how reflexivity can contribute to design and theory in HCI.  She also describes three forms of anthropological writing and the key elements of the technique.  Finally, she describes how ethnography is actually used in the design process of computer-human interaction.

Discussion
This paper, while surely valuable in its field, is extremely hard to read.  There is a lot of information and it seems to me that it could have all been summarized much more succinctly.  I don't know who she expects to actually read the entire paper all the way through and understand everything that she is going on about, because it is simply too much.  The paper serves as a good overall synopsis of a lot of different approaches in the ethnographic realm, but I feel it has virtually no relevance outside of that.