Research Guides: Virtual Fieldwork : Home

Welcome!

This guide is meant to provide a brief introduction to various methods, frameworks, and tools for conducting virtual or remote fieldwork, with a focus on ethnographic research. Please reach out to a librarian if there is anything in this guide you'd like to learn more about or if there's something not here you're interested in.

Virtual Fieldwork

A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography
Few ethnographers have attended to how ethnographic practices are being reshaped by researchers’ own lives and our multiple professional and personal commitments—from childcare and health concerns, to financial, environmental, political, and temporal constraints, to relationship commitments at “home,” to the transience of particular research subjects.
How to conduct an ethnography during social isolation
On YouTube: Some suggestions for anthropology PhD students who face having to conduct their ethnography entirely online because they are unable to visit their fieldsite.
Doing fieldwork in a pandemic
From this in-progress crowd-sourced guide: There are many examples of using online survey tools or doing content analyses or ethnographies using existing online interactions as research materials. Interviews have been conducted by phone or Skype for a long time. This document was initially directed at ways for how to turn fieldwork that was initially planned as using face-to-face methods into a more ‘hands-off’ mode.
Carrying out qualitative research under lockdown
Techniques that qualitative researchers can use to collect data without face-to-face contact with participants.
Conducting Qualitative Fieldwork during COVID 19
A sponsored webinar on conducting qualitative research

From the Library of Congress's "Folklife Today," a three-part series on remote fieldwork:

1) On Remote Fieldwork and “Shifting Gears” by Michelle L. Stefano, Folklife Specialist in Research and Programs at the American Folklife Center

2) Remote fieldwork: tech considerations by John Fenn, Head of Research and Programs at the American Folklife Center

3) Remote fieldwork: Q&A with Thomas Grant Richardson Richardson is an independent folklorist, interviewed by John Fenn

Remote Interviewing

Advice on remote oral history interviewing during the Covid-19 pandemic
This guide was written in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 which has required the suspension of all face-to-face oral history interviewing. In response to increased interest in conducting remote interviews this document attempts to summarise the ethical, legal, methodological and technical issues that individuals and projects will need to consider before deciding whether or not to conduct a remote interview.

Digital Ethnography

The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography by Larissa Hjorth (Editor); Heather Horst (Editor); Anne Galloway (Editor); Genevieve Bell (Editor)
ISBN: 9781138940918
Publication Date: 2016
Features include: a comprehensive history of computers and digitization in anthropology; exploration of various ethnographic methods in the context of digital tools and network relations; consideration of social networking and communication technologies on a local and global scale; in-depth analyses of different interfaces in ethnography, from mobile technologies to digital archives.

Confronting the Digital: Doing Ethnography in Modern Organizational Settings
This article describes aspects of digital ethnography in the study of organizations.

Technology Matters

Tips for Recording Professional Audio Remotely
Helpful tips from the journalism school at UC Berkeley for recording audio (such as interviews) remotely.

If you have technical questions related to recording and saving audio or visual files, contact IITS Audio Visual Services for support.

Other Fieldwork Tips

Ethnographic Fieldwork Methods Guide
This guide contains broader and more in-depth tips on conducting fieldwork.