Ethnography for a Data-Saturated World

Hannah Knox is Lecturer in Digital Anthropology and Material Culture at University College LondonDawn Nafus is Senior Research Scientist at Intel

'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

• 1 Introduction: ethnography for a data-saturated world – Hannah Knox and Dawn NafusPart I: Ethnographies of data science2 Data scientists: a new faction of the transnational field of statistics – Francisca Grommé, Evelyn Ruppert and Baki Cakici3 Becoming a real data scientist: expertise, flexibility and lifelong learning – Ian Lowrie4 Engineering ethnography – Kaiton WilliamsPart II: Knowing data 5 ‘If everything is information’: archives and collecting on the frontiers of data-driven science – Antonia Walford6 Baseless data? Modelling, ethnography and the challenge of the anthropocene – Hannah Knox7 Operative ethnographies and large numbers – Adrian MackenziePart III: Experiments in/of data and ethnography 8 Transversal collaboration: an ethnography in/of computational social science – Mette My Madsen, Anders Blok and Morten Axel Pedersen9 The data walkshop and radical bottom-up data knowledge – Alison Powell10 Working ethnographically with sensor data – Dawn Nafus11 The other ninety per cent: thinking with data science, creating data studies – Joseph Dumit interviewed by Dawn NafusIndex