Transcript Introduction to Ethnography

Introduction to Ethnography
© deSouza, Dittrich, Sharp
Ethnography
• Form of participant observation
• Making the implicit explicit
• Regard what you see as ‘strange’
Dr Xargle’s insight that earthlets come in four colours
— pink, red, brown and yellow — but not,
interestingly, in the colour green
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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-ofview;
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–
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.
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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).
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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.
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Ethnography - History
1915 - 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;
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Ethnography - History
Chicago School of Sociology – 30’s to 60’s
– Broad research program focusing on urban northamerican 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].
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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);
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Examples of Ethnography in
HCI/ CSCW
• John Hughes, Bentley,
Randall, Rodden, and others
from Lancaster: air-traffic
controllers;
• Julian Orr (1996): copymachine technicians;
• Bowers, Button and Sharrock
(1995): printing machines;
• Nardi (1990): spreadsheet
users;
• Heath and Luff (1992): London
Underground controllers;
• And several others.
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Practical Exercise
This exercise will be a chance to start
working with some real data collected by
one of the presenters
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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?...
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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?’
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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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