The Digital Ethnography Initiative (DEI) was founded at the University of Vienna and is the first step towards greater visibility of ethnographic work on “the digital” at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. It aims to establish an open space where department-based expertise, experience and research is visible to colleagues, students and the general public, thus also contributing to ongoing interdisciplinary dialogues and public engagements. Although DEI acknowledges and encourages the inherent interdisciplinary nature of digital ethnography, it also places particular attention on the in-depth understanding of historical developments within ethnography in general and its proximity to the discipline of social and cultural anthropology.

DEI is an attempt to establish a space, where longstanding anthropological interest in ethnography meets interdisciplinary dialogue. We do not only aim to engage in the discussion of what digital ethnography means across disciplinary boundaries but also to address specific issues, theories and methods. By providing an online open-access platform for sharing resources, making local expertise and research projects visible, and by organizing regular events, the initiative aims to provide orientation in a messy world of boundaries-crossing methods for researchers and students alike.

Recent Blog Posts

• Research data as web archives – web archives as research data*
  Svenja Kunze**, Leslie Gauditz*** Good research data management is an essential to digital ethnography but also a challenging process. A wealth of information must be filtered along the lines of the research interests, but also collected, sorted, and stored in a technically and ethically appropriate way. Thereby, this process has many similarities with the work […]
• Cards Against Digital Anthropology
  Suzana Jovicic*, Simone Pfeifer** In 2014, US-based associate anthropology professor Matthew Durington held a class on game design. One of the anthropology games developed by his students was the card game “Cards Against Anthropology”, based on the classic party game “Cards Against Humanity”. The aim is for players to playfully engage with ethically ambiguous scenarios […]
• Grasping the Connection Between Instagram and Digital Activism: A Discussion on Sexual Harassment
  Lea Georgia Locker, Freyja Coreth and Marie Vodicka* This blog post was created for the seminar “The Materiality and Visuality of Social Media” by Philipp Budka for the MA program “CREOLE – Cultural Differences and Transnational Processes” at the University of Vienna. We can observe that gender-based violence against women is still present in many […]

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Header photo by Daniel Gzz on Unsplash.