On the point that data isn't self-explanatory and it needs to be interpreted via @jennaburrell


Image001

On the point that data isn’t self-explanatory and it needs to be interpreted ….here are three well written blogs “The Ethnographer’s Complete Guide to Big Data” by Jenna Burrell follow @jennaburrell

The Ethnographer’s Complete Guide to Big Data: Small Data People in a Big Data World (part 1 of 3)

The Ethnographer’s Complete Guide to Big Data: Answers  (part 2 of 3)

The Ethnographer’s Complete Guide to Big Data: Conclusions  (part 3 of 3)

The conclusion/ insight/ value I feel is in the second piece – highlighted in Red

So where do we stand in relation to this phenomenon as ethnographers, or more generally, as researchers with a bent towards qualitative and interpretivist approaches?

There’s something that ethnographers have in common with big data enthusiasts though neither group perhaps realizes this. Though ethnography has sometimes inaptly been equated out in the wider world with interview studies, it is the immersion of the ethnographer in a social world and the attempt to observe the phenomenon of interest as it unfolds that more distinctively characterizes such a methodological stance. Howard Becker states on the value attributed to this close observation by ethnographers, “the nearer we get to the conditions in which [the people we are studying] actually do attribute meanings to objects and events, the more accurate our description of those meanings are likely to be” (Becker 1996). It is this the closeness to the phenomenon of interest that is a shared concern. There is a common understanding that what people say (out of context, in a private interview or survey) is not a transparent representation of what they do. Ethnographers get at this the labor-intensive way, by hanging around and witnessing things first hand. Big data people do it a different way, by figuring out ways to capture actions in the moment, i.e. someone clicked on this link, set that preference, moved from this wireless access point to that one at a particular time.