Abstract
Based on a study of more than twenty thousand reports on drug experiences from the online drug education portal Erowid, this article argues that the integration of ethnographic methods with computational methods and digital data analysis, including so-called big data, is not only possible but highly rewarding. The analysis of ‘natively’ digital data from sites like Facebook, message boards, and web archives can offer glimpses into worlds of practice and meaning, introduce anthropologists to user-based semantics, provide greater context, help to re-evaluate hypotheses, facilitate access to difficult fields, and point to new research questions. This case study generated important insights into the social and political entanglements of drug consumption, drug phenomenology, and harm reduction. We argue here that deep ethnographic knowledge, what we term ‘field groundedness’, is indispensable for thoroughly making sense of the resulting visualizations, and we advocate for seeing ethnography and digital data analysis in a symbiotic relationship.
Highlights
In recent years, more anthropologists have been venturing into the digital domain, creating ‘netnographies’ (Kozinets 2010) or ‘virtual ethnographies’ (Boellstorff et al 2012) of how people from Trinidad use Facebook (Miller 2011) or how protesters in the United States use Twitter (Juris 2012)
We argue here that deep ethnographic knowledge, what we term ‘field groundedness’, is indispensable for thoroughly making sense of the resulting visualizations, and we advocate for seeing ethnography and digital data analysis in a symbiotic relationship
The case study presents our analysis of an online archive of more than twenty thousand reports of drug experiences posted on the website of Erowid Center, a drug education organization, and its Facebook page
Summary
More anthropologists have been venturing into the digital domain, creating ‘netnographies’ (Kozinets 2010) or ‘virtual ethnographies’ (Boellstorff et al 2012) of how people from Trinidad use Facebook (Miller 2011) or how protesters in the United States use Twitter (Juris 2012). Anthropology is no exception, with digital media generating new research topics (Bonilla and Rosa 2015; Escobar et al 1994; Fader and Gottlieb 2015; Nuttall and Mbembe 2015; Wilf 2013) as well as methods for data collection and analysis (Burrell 2009; Fischer et al 2013; Garcia et al 2009; Murthy 2008; Wesch 2007). The potential for analyzing ever-growing volumes of new kinds of data leads to the need to update conceptual frameworks, as anthropologists (Escobar et al 1994; Fischer et al 2013) and digital humanities scholars (Liu 2012, 21ff.) have remarked
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