This edited collection aims to reimagine and extend ethnography for a data-saturated world. The book brings together leading scholars in the social sciences who have been interrogating and collaborating with data scientists working in a range of different settings. The book explores how a repurposed form of ethnography might illuminate the kinds of knowledge that are being produced by data science. It also describes how collaborations between ethnographers and data scientists might lead to new forms of social analysis
Industry Reviews
Ethnography for a Data Saturated World is a must-read for researchers, students and professionals outside academia wishing to understand what digital data means for our contemporary world. It brings our attention to a burgeoning field of research and practice which unites ethnography and data science on a number of levels. This book takes us into the world of digital data in a mode and depth that only the particular sensibilities of ethnographic research can offer. Its editors and authors collectively provide a new and global vision through ethnographic studies of how the worlds of data scientists are constituted, the ways of knowing and forms of expertise that digital data analysis involves, and the methodological challenges and achievements of work that has created new modes of collaboration between ethnography and digital data analysis. Ethnography for a Data Saturated World is at once a substantive, theoretical and methodological book. It is brimming with significant ethnographic insights and findings about the worlds it examines, it offers an array of different and disciplinary specific modes of thinking theoretically about digital data from anthropology and sociology, and it interrogates the modes of knowing that are implicated in both digital data collection and analysis and in ethnographic practice, as well as the possible connections between them.'
Sarah Pink, Professor of Design and Media Ethnography, RMIT University
