Annette Markham

RMIT University | RMIT · School of Media and Communication

In what ways have forms for engendering the interconnection and materiality required for creative production changed in the time of COVID-19? How and why have our notions of imagining and visualizing cross-cultural production and its modes of research, analysis, and representation shifted? The global pandemic and responses to it through various for...

This working paper introduces key issues and challenges for ethnographic research of digitally saturated social environments, online social contexts, or digitally-mediated phenomena. It focuses on empirical approaches used by ethnographers and sociologists studying digital culture. In the context of digital social research, this may involve observi...

Edited By Annette N. Markham and Katrin Tiidenberg What happens when the internet is absorbed into everyday life? How do we make sense of something that is invisible but still so central? A group of digital culture experts address these questions in Metaphors of Internet: Ways of Being in the Age of Ubiquity. Twenty years ago, the internet was ima...

The idea of doing a self-guided series of prompts for a largescale project in the midst of a global pandemic emerged as a solution to the twin problems of distance and distraction. The goal of a “21-day autoethnography challenge” set of self-guided prompts was to build embodied sensibilities toward the material we study, practice autoethnographic f...

How does this pandemic moment help us to think about the relationships between self and other, or between humans and the planet? How are people making sense of COVID-19 in their everyday lives, both as a local and intimate occurrence with microscopic properties, and a planetary-scale event with potentially massive outcomes? In this paper we describ...

This paper explores echolocation as a conceptual framework to extend our understanding of digital sociality. Echolocation is a process whereby the characteristics of an echo build a map of location and relation. Most often we think of how bats, whales, and dolphins echolocate to navigate. If we think of radar, sonar, or lidar, we might think of sub...

In 5 months of COVID isolation, living out of a suitcase in temporary housing, countless fractal patterns emerged. I can’t say if I created these patterns by looking for them, or that I know the whole world by looking at a grain of sand. The truth of the matter is that it feels like the key for massive scale change is just in front of us, but slipp...

Over 3 years, researchers, artists, and activists collaborated on eight public engagement experiments in five countries. All focused on building critical consciousness about digital futures. The interventions worked: Once participants broke through the seamlessness of interface surfaces, they immediately thought more critically about how digital pl...

Over 30 computational scientists, designers, artists, and activists collaboratively performed eight Museum of Random Memory workshops and exhibitions from 2016 to 2018. Here, we explore how the framework of ‘experimentation’ helped us analyze our own iterative development of techniques to foster critical data literacy. After sketching key aspects o...

In this paper, we focus on one specific participatory installation developed for an exhibition in Aarhus (Denmark) by the Museum of Random Memory, a series of arts-based, public-facing workshops and interventions. The multichannel video installation experimented with how one memory (Trine's) can be represented in three very different ways, through...

This article describes an ongoing series of public arts–based experiments that build critical curiosity and develop data literacy via self-reflexive public interventions. Examined through the lens of remix methodology the Museum of Random Memory exemplifies a form of collective–reflexive meta-analysis whereby interdisciplinary researchers generate...

Critical pedagogy is a vital part of building data literacy. It moves beyond the level of data critique to social action in response to datafication. This article contends that academics can do more to teach those in the public sphere as well as classroom to become critical interpretive researchers of their own lived experience, an action/participa...

This is an introduction to the special issue of “Ethics as Methods: Doing Ethics in the Era of Big Data Research.” Building on a variety of theoretical paradigms (i.e., critical theory, [new] materialism, feminist ethics, theory of cultural techniques) and frameworks (i.e., contextual integrity, deflationary perspective, ethics of care), the Specia...

Beginning with the premise that most regulatory guidelines for research ethics are deeply flawed, this article walks the reader through three models that can help social researchers, technologists, and designers identify and reflect on how they’re approaching ethics, or “doing the right thing” in their own work. The first, an error-avoidance model,...

How do young people make sense of their social media experiences, which rhetoric do they use, which grand narratives of technology and social media do they rely on? Based on discourse analysis of approximately 500 pages of written data and 390 minutes of video (generated by 50 college students aged 18-30 between 2014-2016) this article explores how...

Across the globe, societies are experiencing significant flux and transformation in the way digital information and networked technologies are woven into and influence everyday life, workplace practices, social norms, and institutional structures. Likewise, all academic disciplines are challenged to make sense of these transformations in light of e...

This article discusses how certain sensibilities and techniques from a network perspective can facilitate different levels of thinking about symbolic interaction in mediated contexts. The concept of network implies emergent structures that shift along with the people whose connections construct these webs of significance. A network sensibility reso...

Although fieldwork is the foundation of robust ethnographic inquiry in physical settings, the practical methods have never fit comfortably in digital contexts. For many researchers, the activities of fieldwork must be so radically adjusted, they hardly resemble fieldwork anymore. How does one conduct “participant observation” of Twitter? When ident...

The term ‘data’ functions as a powerful frame for discourse about how knowledge is derived and privileges certain ways of knowing over others. Through its ambiguity, the term can foster a self–perpetuating sensibility that ‘data’ is incontrovertible, something to question the meaning or the veracity of, but not the existence of. This article critic...

This article focuses on innovative methods for protecting privacy in research of Internet-mediated social contexts. Traditional methods for protecting privacy by hiding or anonymizing data no longer suffice in situations where social researchers need to design studies, manage data, and build research reports in increasingly public, archivable, sear...

This chapter reviews salient characteristics of the internet to illustrate some of the ways internet-based media can influence the shape, scope, and direction of a study. This chapter suggests that substantial benefit can be gained by considering the methodological implications of these characteristics, whether one is using the internet as a tool f...

In this introductory chapter, the authors review some of the challenges in this era of internet research, noting that even in these amorphous contexts, quality and rigor emerge from our abilities to comprehend and heed the lessons learned by previous generations of researchers while understanding the need for flexible adaptation, a process of recon...

Review: "Internet Inquiry presents distinctive and divergent viewpoints on how to think about and conduct qualitative Internet research. Organized around methodological questions, this book addresses ethical, practical, and logistical issues, employing an approach that fosters open-ended dialogue. Each question is addressed by three researchers fro...

reprint version

This article presents findings from an ethnographic research project as well as a study of method that explores the meaning of the popular phrase Go Ugly Early as it is claimed and lived out by a group of males in a popular bar. Acknowledging that similar methods can accomplish some of the same results and effects, this piece is an example of writi...

5 This article provides a critical, cautionary stance toward the future structure of "Internet studies" as a field. A social construc- tionist reading of the process of organizing reveals the ways in which apparently obdurate structures are constructed and negoti- ated through everyday discursive practices. Subsequent structures and practices funct...

As our metaphorical conceptualizations of the term "Internet" become more concrete, walls of meaning are constructed around us, reifying a "box" that we will be asking ourselves to think outside of in the future. As scholars working along the cutting edges of Information and Communication Technologies, we are partially responsible for shaping what...

lienating for some, yet most intimate and real for others, emerging communications technologies are creating a varied array of cyberspace experiences. Nowhere are the new and old more intertwined, as familiar narratives of the past and radical visions of the future inform our attempts to assess the impact of cyberspace on self and society. Amidst t...

This is a study of how we come to know others through the research process, the study of how contexts of Cyberspace are constructed through discourse, and a study of how eight people who live a portion of or most of their lives online make sense of their experiences. The overall goal of this project was to study how identities, organizations, and c...

This article provides a critical ethnographic account of how the members of a small design company experienced a work environment riddled with ambiguous communication. I present the organization's official philosophies as well as the discourse of the members to illustrate how ambiguous communication was strategically applied and how members respond...

This essay presents a critical‐interpretive case study of an organization that illustrates the communicative accomplishment of organizational power. It details how the managing ownership espoused a rhetoric of self‐directive management which obscured conflicting political interests and relations of power. The case study demonstrates the difficultie...

From the Publisher:Alienating for some, yet most intimate and real for others, emerging communications technologies are creating a varied array of cyberspace experiences. Nowhere are the new and old more intertwined, as familiar narratives of the past and radical visions of the future inform our attempts to assess the impact of cyberspace on self a...

The issue of representation is an evolving theme in many disciplines, particularly interpretive sociology. Fundamental to the nature of ethnographic texts and therefore our understanding of culture are the voices of the participants woven together with the voice of the author. Because the intersection of participant, interpreter/author, and audienc...

Typescript. Thesis (M.A.)--Washington State University, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-44).