Paper Reading #19

Reflexivity in digital anthropology

Author: Jennifer A. Rode - Drexel University, Philadelphia


Proceeding: CHI'11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems

Summary
There are three types of anthropological writings, consisting of realist, confessional, and impressionistic writing styles. Even though realist writing is most common, all have some good qualities. These types of writing have specific values that can affect the HCI design process.


Hypothesis
This paper’s purpose is to establish and characterize the contributions of anthropological ethnography.

Methods
Realist writing consists of creating a sense of authority from the author because of the fact they have collected data directly in the environment they are studying. This prolonged exposure to the environment gives enough data to determine an unambiguous result. The goal is to minimize the effect of the observer in the situation from the precision of the data.


Confessional writing instead directly uses the opinions of the observer. Since the observer now has a noted effect on how the perceived data is collected, the authority may be diminished, but sometimes allows for demystifying the data collecting process. Since ethnographers tend to avoid adding their own opinions in the process, this type of writing is not as common as realist writing.


Impressionist writing is done similarly to a narrative. Sometimes writers try to startle the audience through dramatic recall instead of dry facts.


One task the ethnographer should try to accomplish is to establish and maintain rapport with the subjects they are studying. This is to say that the subjects have a mutual understanding of how and why the ethnographer is doing a study. This allows access to the data being collected. However, lack of rapport sometimes allows understanding of the differences of cultures from the ethnographer and the subjects.


Participant observation is the core to reflexive studies. It is described as "deep hanging out" and is the key to cultural anthropology. 


If anthropology is purely experimental, it is essential for the opinions of the author to be left out. However, the relationships with the experimenter always causes actions that can not be properly explained without considering the writer's existence. This is the key to a formative design process.

Three different forms of ethnography can be used to HCI practices.

1. Formative ethnographies determine how technologies are currently being used for the purpose of improving the technology.
2. Summative ethnographies details how a certain group uses a technology, but does not help towards the HCI design process since it done after the fact.
3. Iteratively evaluated ethnographies use prototypes in practice and determine how well they are used. This data is used to improve another prototype design.

Results
There was no testing


Conclusion
It makes perfect sense to use ethnographic data for the HCI design process. If a design or product isn't working for some reason, it can either be redesigned to be "better" in the designer's eye, or the customer's mind. The designer can become disconnected from what the end-user wants, but the end-user can't always know what they want since they don't understand the technology in detail.