Advancing Mixed Digital Methods Digital Ethnography and Digital Methods in Contemporary Media Cultures

Digital methods and digital ethnography are part of the computational turn in the humanities and social sciences (Hesse-Biber, 2011). Yet, these two innovative approaches to empirical research often operate in relative isolation. On the one hand, understood as the techniques used for studying societal change with online data, digital methods rely on digital objects such as hyperlinks, hashtags, time stamps, and engagement metrics (Rogers, 2013) to answer questions about “the relationship between digital technologies and the social world.” Thus, digital methods recognize the methodological implications of working with web data, their availability, and their varying qualities. On the other hand, social science researchers can use digital ethnography to transcend the physical boundaries of fieldwork, uncover socio-cultural assumptions in interfaces, and reveal the symbolic meanings that their affordances create (Murthy, 2008; Ritter, 2022). Although some attempts have been made to bridge the gap between these two methodologies (Caliandro, 2018), a comprehensive examination of how the integration and applications of these two methodologies could be used for augmented empiricism in social sciences remains largely uncharted.
In this chapter, we employ a self-reflective approach, revisiting two of our previous research projects to explore how a mixed-methods digital framework could have been applied to address some of the challenges we faced during our previous projects. The first project involved a digital methods exploration that mapped digital violence against news workers, focusing on repetitive attacks in tweets tagging BBC Political editor Laura Kuenssberg (DMI, 2022). The second project involved a digital ethnography of journalists’ perspectives on digitally mediated violence and the role of social media platforms and news organizations in addressing the uptick in harassment against the press (Dodds, Geboers, et al., 2023). Given both projects’ focus on online violence, we were keen to uphold a sensitivity to digital environments and the agency of platforms’ architectural designs (Davis, 2020). The underlying premise was that violent behavior is at least in part a product of social media environments that are significantly shaped by the communicative design of both digital objects as well as affordances. This puts to the fore a sensitivity to the agential properties of digital platform architectures, not merely in conducting or channeling harassment but also in shaping the kinds of harassment that play out against the press and news workers. While contextualization in the ethnographic process was indeed attained through outlining power asymmetries and professional dependencies on social media platforms, in the end, neither project effectively integrated digital ethnography with digital methods.
Nevertheless, these projects primed us to see the potentialities that would lie in a digital methods-informed ethnographic approach and vice versa. For example, an ethnographic account of findings from the digital methods project would allow for a more holistic understanding of the interplay between users and technologies, integrating online and offline interactions considering how digital and physical experiences intersect. In the context of journalism and social media intersections, this is an especially important task (Lewis & Westlund, 2015).
Attacks on and distrust of news media can be situated within wider growing negative dispositions against democratic institutions (Ladd & Podkul, 2018). Beliefs about legacy news media as being part and parcel of a so-called elitist conspiracy are no longer niche. Such larger shifts in public opinion dynamics can only effectively be addressed if we understand the ‘big tech-circumscribed spaces of representation’ drawn up by platform affordances. While not deterministic, social media architectures sustain logics of content circulation that pivot audiences toward certain kinds of engagement (Dodds, de Vreese, et al., 2023). This circumscribing and affording but also constraining behavior directly relates to ethnographic insights from the field, as they make up the digital environment and the lived realities of people, including their perspectives, practices, and experiences. It is pivotal to acknowledge that ethnographic insights from the field (see also chapters one, three and nine of this book) emerge from everyday uses of social media that inherently leave particular environmental aspects of such platforms out of view. Apart from the impossibility of a God’s eye view in general, the way in which content circulates and connects to other content and other publics on the web is also hidden from view. In other words, the networked (and commodifiable) structures that arise from sharing news on social media need to be rendered visible to get a ‘sense of environment’ that feeds back into the lived experiences we excavate with ethnography. As such, in this chapter, we aim to chart the analytical affordances and gaps of an ethnographic and digital methods project to exemplify future integration opportunities.