ABSTRACT
Collaborative and interdisciplinary digital platforms open up novel modes of inquiry for engaging with the production of data on pressing social issues, like violence and carcerality. Ethnography is particularly well positioned to explore the understandings of different knowledge communities as well as documenting power relations among various actors. Media such as data visualizations, podcasts, film, photography, and illustrations, official (and unofficial) statistics, legal and bureaucratic archives, economic and sociological surveys, policy memos, essays, and interviews, all provide different compositional resources for including diverse voices, viewpoints and aesthetics. The possibilities of combining ethnography with digital platform-driven research has the capacity to generate unexpected collaborations and allow novel connections between seemingly unrelated issues. The result is an experimental digital space for the production of responsive scholarship.
