ABSTRACT
Digital humanities has mostly been associated with practices such as creating large corpora, data mining large datasets and curating digital collections of cultural materials. Ethnographic research – despite its centrality as a ‘humanities’ approach and its long history as an important approach to the study of language – has not been widely seen as belonging to the mainstream of digital humanities research. However, digital ethnography is increasingly used as an approach to understanding cultural formations, social relationships and linguistic and communicative practices in the digital age. This chapter first briefly discusses the main tenets of the ‘pre-digital’ ethnographic tradition, building on the fundamental understanding that ethnography is not a method, but an approach. The specific characteristics of digital ethnographic research will also be discussed and ethnography placed within a broader frame of recent developments in digital research. Next, critical issues in digital ethnography will be reviewed, with a particular focus on contextualisation. The specifics of digital ethnographic research and its particular strengths in describing and analysing communicative and linguistic digital practices will be further illuminated through a brief overview of current digital ethnographic research and an analysis of ‘memic’ online communication (i.e. resemiotised signs involving memic-intertextual recognisability, in the case analysed here through a shared hashtag). Finally, future directions in digital ethnography will be addressed.
