Methods for Shaping Society | DMLcentral - 1 views
-
Research methods are routinely understood as objective techniques for getting to know the world. Yet they may be more influential and socially significant than this, particularly as more digital methods are being developed and deployed. So what, too, do digital methods do?
-
John Fenn on 21 May 12post focused on 'digital media and learning' field, but how might these questions apply to "ethnography"?
-
-
However, underpinning the technicality of methods is the assumption that they are able to capture and represent the world just as it is. Methods are understood rather like a photographic device that can capture, freeze-frame and reproduce a facsimile of reality. As researchers, we can say we've done a good job if our methods have been up to the job of capturing a picture of an objective reality as it really is—or at least pretty accurately so.
-
But much the same can be said of anthropological ethnographers returning from fieldwork. Their fieldnotes, photographs, dictaphone recordings, transcripts and video data are much like the neuroscientist's CAT and PET scans. They represent a reality—a human brain, a culture, whatever—that has been recorded and made presentable enough for interpretation. But are research methods really so objective? Or do they do other things?
- ...11 more annotations...
-
I really like this piece! I'm not super familiar with DML as a field, but the author's attention to the world-making capabilities (and not even capabilities - it's built in or "politically preloaded") of research methods. The post provides a clear defense against those who would argue that research is just objectively recording the world. At the same time, it doesn't slip into a poststructuralist wormhole about meaning. There's an attention to politics here that 's fruitful [Ah! but politics in general.. What are this author's projects' politics? What departmental/ disciplinary political fights shape the ground on which DML research takes place?]
