ABSTRACT
This chapter explores app development as a form of highly reflexive, ethnographic research in its own right. When this chapter first started Anthropology by the Wire four years ago, it uses the primary media tools of the visual anthropology toolkit, namely video cameras and supplementary audio-recording devices to make lineal ethnographic documentaries. It examines that it is time for apps to be considered recursively along with other elements of a networked anthropology: as data, as analysis, as interpretation and as, ultimately, a collaborative, open design. In doing so, the chapter furthering the core activities of the Anthropology by the Wire project that combine ethnographic training with production, collaboration, analysis, and novel forms of dissemination that are part of a burgeoning networked anthropology. Finally The chapter examines the idea of using app development as a tool for networked anthropology presents salubrious dilemmas.
