Date: 2026-02-22
Observe a media practice or cultural space—a gaming community, Instagram subculture, or streaming chat, among other examples. Take detailed field notes. What do people actually do versus what they say they do? Experiment with thick description. Consider what this method shows you that close reading couldn’t.
Doing Ethnography resources from Penn Libraries
“A virtual ethnography is one that fully immerses the ethnographer into the consensual reality experienced by groups of people who use computer-mediated communication as their primary, and often only, means of communication. As such, the online or virtual personas of the participants are the main focus of the ethnographer. Generally, researchers have wanted to focus on the person at the keyboard; a virtual ethnography reverses this and works instead with the persona that has been projected into cyberspace by the typist.” –1999 Issues in virtual ethnography. In K. Buckner (Ed.), Proceedings of Esprit i3 workshop on ethnographic studies(pp. 61-69). Edinburgh: Queen Margaret College.
Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media - E. Gabriella Coleman
Gabriella Coleman’s research on the hacker community
Your Place or Minecraft
The ‘mLab server’ is one of the most modded Minecraft servers in the world. But what makes it really special is that it is owned by academic game research centres of Concordia University where the players—students and professors—all work together in real life. Their real life friendships, objectives and conflicts result in fascinating, self-reflexive and sometimes explosive gameplay.
Spend 5-7 days observing (and possibly participating in) an online community or digital space. Options:
What do people do? What topics are talked about? What rules (stated and unstated) govern behavior? What conflicts arise? What gets celebrated? Pay attention to rituals, inside jokes, hierarchies, and how newbies are treated.
Then write up your observations using “thick description”—not what happened, but what it might mean in context. What surprised you? What didn’t you understand? Be honest about the limitations of your access and perspective. What would you need to observe longer to understand?
Methodological reflection: How does your approach compare to what you’ve read in Taylor, Nardi, Boellstorff, or Geertz? What ethnographic techniques did you borrow or adapt? What was different about your situation or access? If you were to continue this research, what would you do differently based on what these scholars modeled?