© desouza, dittrich, sharp introduction to ethnography

© deSouza, Dittrich, Sharp

Introduction to Ethnography


Ethnography

Dr Xargle’s insight that earthlets come in four colours — pink, red, brown and yellow — but not, interestingly, in the colour green

• Form of participant observation• Making the implicit explicitexplicit• Regard what you see as ‘strange’

© deSouza, Dittrich, Sharp3

Ethnography - definition• Greek:

1. ethnos = nation;

2. graphein = write;

Writing a culture;

• An approach/ research method to allow one to gain an understanding about the informant’s point-of-view;

– The main focus is on the informant’s point of view. What is and is not important, relevant, interesting, painful, exciting to the informant. Not to the researcher.

– The researcher aims to gain this understanding and write about it. Writing is as important as everything else.


Ethnography’s hallmark is this notion of participant observation, the idea that you learn about other people's cultural practices by going there, being there, and by doing it with them. Most traditional anthropologists who would consider themselves to be ethnographers have spent years living in other cultures with people, and not just watching what they do, but actually doing it, too

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Ethnography - definition“Ethnography comes out of anthropology. Anthropology would be the study of people and culture at a pretty broad level. Ethnography is about trying to make sense of people, not as individual personalities, not in a psychological sense, and not as societal movements, but as people embedded in what Clifford Getz used to call "webs of significance." It's thinking about people from the multiple ways in which they identify themselves, in a very holistic way.” (Genevieve Bell, May 2004).


Why should we care?In fact, the very last question I ask people is, "What do you do with your computer?" The first question I ask people is, "Tell me what you did yesterday." You'll get to technology, because it's in everyone's lives, but you'll want to make sure you understand the kinds of lives in which it is embedded. You can't work out what someone does with their mobile phone unless you know how they care about their family. (Genevieve Bell, May 2004).

Why we should care?–To design, develop, build, evaluate (and sell) solutions

that are useful.Ethnography allows us to understand the informant’s culture including his values, beliefs, power relations, myths, and, what is relevant to us, work practices.


Ethnography - History1915 - Bronislaw Malinowski’s “Argonauts of the Western Pacific”– The modern approach for

field studies. Field studies should be in the field, not in a library as done before;

– Focus on exotic, “primitive”, cultures, on understanding institutions, costumes and daily life;


Ethnography - HistoryChicago School of Sociology – 30’s to 60’s

– Broad research program focusing on urban north-american life [Dourish, 2004 pag. 60];

– Lead to several studies of • marginalized [sub]-cultures: drug addicts, prisioners, etc. • Specific aspects of work including medical school students,

nurses, policeman, teachers, etc.

– This is relevant because it introduced a concern with work practices, with how work is carried out by social actors. This eventually lead to the adoption of ethnography in the study of use, design, development, and deployment of computational tools [Dourish, 2004 p60].


Ethnography - History

In HCI / CSCW, Suchman’s “Plans and Situated Actions” (1987)– A critique to the AI

planning model;– The planning model

was embedded in the design of computational devices (in the UI);


Examples of Ethnography in HCI/ CSCW

• John Hughes, Bentley, Randall, Rodden, and others from Lancaster: air-traffic controllers;

• Julian Orr (1996): copy-machine technicians;

• Bowers, Button and Sharrock (1995): printing machines;

• Nardi (1990): spreadsheet users;

• Heath and Luff (1992): London Underground controllers;

• And several others.


Practical Exercise

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This exercise will be a chance to start working with some real data collected by one of the presenters


Duration of an Ethnographic study• A traditional ethnographic study (in anthropology)

has usually a 1-year duration (Nardi;1997:p363) for 2 reasons:– In primitive cultures, one needs to learn the language, adapt

to life conditions (health, hygiene, etc). The researcher can even get sick!

– In the academic system, one year is enough so that the student can graduate at some point

• In CSCW / HCI, the focus is on work practices– 1 year is not necessary; – 6 weeks is enough to get good results, sometimes even less

than that. – It depends on the context and research question.


Ethnographic Research• Data Collection methods

– Participant [and non-participant] observation;– Unstructured and semi-structured interviews;– Less common:

• Videos;• Data collection; and• Diary studies.

• Data Analysis– Thematic– Grounded Theory– Distributed Cognition and so on


Ethnography of Software Engineering

Software Engineering as Cooperative Work• Artificial Intelligence as Craftwork.• On occurred practices in software engineering.• The user as a Scenic Feature.• Multi Organisational Middleware Development• ...Why is it difficult to research software engineering?• Software engineering is a highly skilled practice• Software is not visible as such• Software development is coordinated via ‘texts’ only


Ethnography in Software Engineering Research• A study on maintenance work.• Ethnography on agile development.• Configuration Management• Research on distributed development

(DeSouza, Singer, and more)• Our projects • ...

But it’s often not only ethnography.


Why Ethnography is Difficult to Apply in Software Engineering

• Researching ‘up’.• Engineering is not only about understanding but

about deploying the understanding for improvement.

• It is not only the research community that expects improvements: We expect that ourselves, as well as the people we research with.

• We get involved with ethics in a different sense than pure social scientists.

... And what about publishing Ethnography in SE?...


Suitable research questions‘How do software practitioners develop systems using XP?’

rather than ‘Is single programmer coding more productive than pair

programming?’

‘Why don’t Financial mathematicians adhere to a company manual of software development practice?’ rather than

‘Does structuring the manual in this way help financial mathematicians produce more lines of code an hour?’

‘What are the characteristics of a technology adoption?’ rather than

‘How did the ideas of Simula develop into Java?’


Examples of Ethnography in SE• Grinter (1996): software developers and their usage of

configuration management tools;

• Button and Sharrock (1996): collaboration in SE

• Low et al (1996): year-long ethnography of a large team

• Sim and Holt (1998): enculturaltion of new developers

• Staundenmayer (1997): task dependencies in software

• Ducheneaut (2005): open source software community;

• De Souza (2004): software developers and their use of API

for co-ordination

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© desouza, dittrich, sharp introduction to ethnography

Documents

ethnography history1915

ethnography definitiongreek

adoption of ethnography

study of people

sense of people

work practices

field studies

informants culture