This week I have been thinking about how I could represent the digital artefact for the ethnography assignment for Block 2 of the course. While my artefact for Block 1 was decidedly exploratory, I plan to make the Block 2 artefact more scholarly persuasive. I am still unsure of how to achieve this though.

As described in a previous post, I plan to use an online text visualisation tool, textisbeautiful.net, to represent the dynamics of the MOOC community. My goal is less about counting words or measuring the popularity of keywords and phrases, but about using text visualization to uncover hidden patterns. How to achieve what Hine (2000) describes as “depth of description” without a “lack of reliance on a priori hypotheses” is crucial. A good text visualisation that achieves fairness without an analytical lens (the a priori hypotheses) seems to me a misnomer.

Reflexivity might hold the key though. Hine (2000) talks about three ways of how reflexivity might be applied in an ethnography: by valuing the ethnographer’s and members’ understanding equally, by focusing on the ethnographer’s perspective and history, and by explaining the contingent nature of the work.

By including myself as ethnographer in the work, I can hopefully generate a text visualisation that is fair to the MOOC community I chose to study.

Reference:
Hine, C (2000) The virtual objects of ethnography, chapter 3 of Virtual ethnography. London: Sage. pp41-66