Paper Reading #19: Reflexivity in Digital Antrhopology

• Title: Reflexivity in Digital Antrhopology
• Reference Information:
• Jennifer A. Rode. 2011. Reflexivity in digital anthropology.  In <em>Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems</em> (CHI '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA,  123-132. DOI=10.1145/1978942.1978961 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1978942.1978961
• CHI '11 Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing systems 
• Author Bios:
• Jennifer Rode is an assistant professor at Drexel's School of Information. Rode has produced several interface design projects. 
• Summary
• Hypothesis:
• The researcher hypothesized that various forms of digital anthropology can be utilized by researchers to learn more during field studeis.  No new ideas were presented in this paper.  Rather, ideas relating to utilizing other aspects in the digital research world were presented. 
• Methods
• The researcher did not perform any user studies as seen in other papers.  Instead, the author spent much of the paper simply defining different forms/aspects of digital anthropology.  These definitions had been collected from previously published research.  The researcher then argues why many of these unused techniques could be beneficial in digital research.
• Results
• Building off of the definitions, the researcher shows that the 'messy bit' may be where focus needs to be placed to gain a more valuable insight for digital research.  Since developers design for human users, all aspects of the human user's interactions should be considered.
• Contents
• This paper presents an argument for including the voice of the enthographer during both the experience and discussion afterwards.  These are techniques that have not previously been used in the HCI field for research, but it is argued that they will help developers be more succesful by understanding their users better.
• Discussion
•  It is hard to say whether or not the auther sucessfully proved her hypothesis over the course of this paper.  To me, it seemed more like an unsupported idea was written about in this paper, with nothing more than definitions from other research placed in here to help define the idea.  Since there was no study done to imply a greater level effectiveness from her various ethnography proposals, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that she is correct.  On the other hand, how would one really provide evidence that one opinionated summary is better than another?  Either way, it was an interesting read that gives a useful reminder: don't ignore the users you are designing for in the first place.