Trace ethnography

A specific adaptation of ethnography, involving the detailed examination of digital traces or records left by individuals and groups interacting within a technological environment. Aims to understand users’ behaviours, practices, and social interactions by studying the digital footprints they leave behind.

documentary traces abound in today’s technological systems, logging specific actions taken by uniquely-identifiable individuals with very fine levels of granularity. While these data are routinely used to quantitatively determine abstract qualities of a system (e.g., tracking the browsing habits of a website’s visitors), our methodology involves decoding, or inverting, these traces to provide rich qualitative accounts of individual users as they act within a broader social or organizational setting. — R. Stuart Geiger & David Ribes, “Trace ethnography: Following coordination through documentary practices” (2011)

Sources may include transaction logs, version histories, institutional records, conversation transcripts, source code, etc. Assembling trace data to form narratives of people’s engagement with information systems.

Enabled by the digitisation of social interactions and proliferation of documentary traces in technological systems, which log the actions of uniquely identifiable individuals.

Participants frequently use these documentary traces themselves, to coordinate and make their activities accountable to each other. (Geiger and Ribes 2011)

For example, in co-authoring a document, it is common to use the “track changes” feature present in many word processing programs. This feature embeds information about who changed what to a document and when, so that an author can reconstruct the history of a document. However, just as this information is available to authors, so too can it be valuable for ethnographic researchers. — R. Stuart Geiger & David Ribes, “Trace ethnography: Following coordination through documentary practices” (2011)

The traces of one’s online presence are also the mechanisms through which editors themselves navigate the sea of blue constituted by Wikipedia content, hyperlinks, and metapages. To a great extent, the ethnographic way of following actors and the affordances through which they act mimics the very sociotechnical documentary practices that editors mobilize. — Guilherme Fians, “The death of Elizabeth II on Wikipedia: fleshing out freedom through technoliberal participation online” (2024)

• [⎈] Explore how trace ethnography builds on and extends previous ethnographic approaches like multi-sited ethnography, document ethnography, and virtual ethnography in studying distributed, mediated interactions.
• [⎈] Consider the epistemological foundations of treating digital traces as legitimate objects of ethnographic study, rather than supplementary data. How does trace ethnography reframe what counts as an ethnographic “field site”?
• [?] How complete and representative are the digital footprints of the actual interactions? What interactions might trace ethnography miss?
• [&] See also: stigmergy?

Backlinks

: Screenshots : Stigmergy