Paper Reading #19: Reflexivity in digital anthropology

Reflexivity in digital anthropology

Chi '11

By:
Jennifer A. Rode.

• Jennifer A. Rode is currently an Associate Professor at Drexel's School of Information.

Summary
Hypothesis
The author of this paper hypothesised that if people could more effectively and efficiently use the various types and opportunities of ethnographies that exist, the field of HCI would greatly benefit from such use and therefore allow for far superior user oriented development.

Methods
This paper was more of an opinion piece. The author put forward a hypothesis that couldn't really be tested. It was set up more along the lines where the author listed various types of ethnographies, defines them and then states a set scenario under which that type of ethnography is ideal. There was no user testing that needed to be prepared for.

Results
Considering the utter lack of testing, there weren't exactly a whole lot of results. She did however define 'reflexivity' as possessing four primary characteristics. She defines Digital Anthropology and how it affects her work and the field of HCI. She also makes some broad statements about the HCI community and their various methods of utilising ethnographies and their results.

Contents
The author of this paper attempted to bring the varying type of ethnographies to the front of the HCI community's collective mind and try to urge more frequent, effective and efficient use of ethnographies to further the field of HCI.


Discussion
I found this paper fairly awkward to read considering the type of papers we've read so far for this class. While this paper did refer to HCI I felt this was more of a Anthropology paper than a computer science paper. I agree with some of what she said, especially her statements regarding how members of the HCI field utilise ethnographies; however I still felt that this paper was very out of place in a Computer Science based journal.