Ethnography and Virtual Worlds

Tom Boellstorff is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine. His books include Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Bonnie Nardi is professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Her books include My Life as a Night Elf Priest: An Anthropological Account of World of Warcraft. Celia Pearce is associate professor of digital media at Georgia Institute of Technology. Her books include Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds. T. L. Taylor is associate professor of comparative media studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her books include Play Between Worlds: Exploring Online Game Culture.

"[W]e can hope that young scholars and established ones, friends and critics of ethnography alike, will read this book, take it seriously, and carry it with them in whatever world they study and inhabit."--Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review "In this useful volume, the coauthors, each of whom is an accomplished virtual world ethnographer, pretty much put to rest threshold questions that might be raised about whether virtual worlds and online cultures can be proper objects of anthropological research... [T]he authors provide as much insight and instructive commentary about traditional ethnography as they do about the ethnography of virtual worlds."--Choice "Ethnography and Virtual Worlds provides invaluable advice, tips, guidelines, principles, and further resources to aid researchers through every stage of a participant observation virtual worlds research project, from choosing the online field site to writing and publishing the results."--John F. Barber, Leonardo Reviews "[The authors] have produced a very interesting and timely contribution; clearly written, with easy-to-follow case studies... Ethnography and Virtual Worlds will be useful to any graduate student in social sciences, but as well in humanities, media and Cultural Studies or in any interdisciplinary approach focused on virtual worlds. It is not an introduction to ethnography as such, rather a helpful guide to help scholars already familiar with ethnography and related methodologies to adapt their approaches to cases using the Internet and interactive virtual worlds."--Yves Laberge, LSE Review of Books "I would ... enthusiastically recommend this book to people interested in virtual world and other digital media ethnography--not just as a handbook of method--but as a compilation of the collective wisdom of these four very experienced and highly respected ethnographers--and as a thoroughly good read."--Jeni Paay, Computer Supported Cooperative Work "Either at the chapter level or as a whole, Ethnography and Virtual Worlds provides invaluable advice, tips, guide-lines, principles and further resources to aid researchers through every stage of a participant observation virtual worlds research project, from choosing the online field site to writing and publishing the results."--John F. Barber, Leonardo

• Acknowledgments xi Foreword, by George Marcus xiii Chapter 1. Why This Handbook? 1 1.1 Beginnings 1 1.2 Why ethnographic methods and why virtual worlds? 6 1.3 Why a handbook? 8 1.4 An orientation to the virtual worlds we studied 9 Chapter 2. Three Brief Histories 13 2.1 A brief history of ethnographic methods 13 2.2 A brief history of virtual worlds 22 2.3 A brief history of research on virtual world cultures 25 2.4 The uses of history 27 Chapter 3. Ten Myths about Ethnography 29 3.1 Ethnography is unscientific 30 3.2 Ethnography is less valid than quantitative research 36 3.3 Ethnography is simply anecdotal 40 3.4 Ethnography is undermined by subjectivity 41 3.5 Ethnography is merely intuitive 42 3.6 Ethnography is writing about your personal experience 43 3.7 Ethnographers contaminate fieldsites by their very presence 44 3.8 Ethnography is the same as grounded theory 45 3.9 Ethnography is the same as ethnomethodology 46 3.10 Ethnography will become obsolete 48 Chapter 4. Research Design and Preparation 52 4.1 Research questions: emergence, relevance, and personal interest 52 4.2 Selecting a group or activity to study 57 4.3 Scope of the fieldsite 59 4.4 Attending to offline contexts 61 Chapter 5. Participant Observation in Virtual Worlds 65 5.1 Participant observation in context 65 5.2 Participant observation in practice 69 5.3 Preparing the researching self 72 5.4 Taking care in initiating relationships with informants 76 5.5 Making mistakes 79 5.6 Taking extensive fieldnotes 82 5.7 Keeping data organized 85 5.8 Participant observation and ethnographic knowledge 87 5.9 The timing and duration of participant observation 88 5.10 The experimenting attitude 90 Chapter 6. Interviews and Virtual Worlds Research 92 6.1 The value of interviews in ethnographic research 92 6.2 Effective interviewing 94 6.3 The value of group interviews in ethnographic research 104 6.4 Size, structure, and location for group interviews 106 6.5 Transcription 110 Chapter 7. Other Data Collection Methods for Virtual Worlds Research 113 7.1 Capturing chatlogs 113 7.2 Capturing screenshots 114 7.3 Capturing video 116 7.4 Capturing audio 117 7.5 Data collection in other online contexts 118 7.6 Historical and archival research 120 7.7 Virtual artifacts 121 7.8 Offline interviews and participant observation 124 7.9 Using quantitative data 126 Chapter 8. Ethics 129 8.1 The principle of care 129 8.2 Informed consent 131 8.3 Mitigating institutional and legal risk 135 8.4 Anonymity 136 8.5 Deception 142 8.6 Sex and intimacy 144 8.7 Doing good and compensation 146 8.8 Taking leave 148 8.9 Accurate portrayal 149 Chapter 9. Human Subjects Clearance and Institutional Review Boards 151 9.1 Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) 151 9.2 Preparing a protocol for IRB review 153 9.3 Working with IRBs 155 9.4 Informed consent and anonymity 156 Chapter 10. Data Analysis 159 10.1 Ethnographic data analysis: flexibility and emergence 159 10.2 Preliminary reflections while in the field 160 10.3 The role of theory in data analysis 162 10.4 Beginning data analysis: systematize and thematize 164 10.5 Working with participant observation data 168 10.6 Working with individual and group interview data 170 10.7 Working with images, video, and textual data 172 10.8 The end of the data analysis phase: from themes to narratives and arguments 174 10.9 Generalization and comparison 176 Chapter 11. Writing Up, Presenting, and Publishing Ethnographic Research 182 11.1 The early stages of writing up: conferences, drafts, blogs 182 11.2 Written genres 185 11.3 Dissemination 186 11.4 The writing process 190 11.5 A quick trip back to the field? 192 11.6 Tone, style, and audience 193 Chapter 12. Conclusion: Arrivals and New Departures 196 References 201 Index 223