THEMES, ISSUES AND METHODS IN ETHNODIGITOGRAPHY:
Visual Social Research in a Digital World

Some Definitions and History

In the last century, social sciences such as sociology and anthropology have applied natural science methods (such as objective description, careful measurement and mathematization, logical analysis, etc.) to studying people (prefatory notes: initial proposal.)

Both sociology and anthropology use "participant observation" or "ethnography" as one of their main methods, producing thousands of lengthy texts describing various human behaviours.

But a picture may be worth a thousand words, as National Geographic has discovered!

Hence, "visual ethnography" has used photography, film, and video to describe human behaviours and cultures--much as documentary photographers, filmmakers, and videographers.

Half a century after the pioneering efforts of Walker Evans and his colleagues working to document the human realities of such social issues as the the Great Depression through still photography, the World Wide Web now offers unprecedented opportunities for expanding and speeding communications about ourselves--And the possibility of ETHNODIGITOGRAPHY!

But to this point, social scientists have continued to remain verbally rather than visually oriented -- even on the WEB. (See, for example, Social Research Update, or "The Qualitative Page" at the University of Alberta.) A few however, are getting quite visually interesting: The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interactionism, and The Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing at the University of Kent in England.

Perhaps for some good reasons: there are a number of difficult problems in the ethnodigitographical project.