Clifford Geertz's "thick description" has become a stalwart of ethnographic methodYesterday, in the first session of EPIC2013, Martin Ortlieb asked a question that stopped me in my tracks. Plenty of people, he said, think that big data collection is creepy. Every day, as we interact in a computer-saturated world, bits of information about our personal selves are being collected and deployed by marketing companies to sell us stuff and spy on us. But are classic ethnographic methods really any different? Don’t people find it creepy when us anthropologists go poking around, asking questions?One conference panelist responded that she didn’t think anthropological methods were creepy, because we spend so much time building relationships with people. And, in a sense, she is absolutely right. We don’t (at least in ideal practice) just run into the field, take what we need, and leave. We make friends–we are even adopted into families–and we take what people tell us seriously. They trust us to use their data appropriately and ethically. Clifford Geertz coined the term “thick description” to describe the care we take as ethnographers to get to the heart of what people do and why they do it.But does this mean that what anthropologists do is not creepy? I have my doubts. Sure, we are trusted, we generally collect data about far fewer people, and it’s often difficult to identify the individual in what we do collect. But, realistically, our research participants have no better idea what we do with the information they give us than do social media users whose data is harvested en masse[Read the rest of the article]: Why thick data can be just as creepy as big dataAuthor informationErin TaylorPost Doctoral Research Fellow, Instituto de Ciências Sociais, University of Lisbon at Research Fellow, Digital Ethnography Research CentreErin originally studied fine art, but she defected to anthropology when she realised that she was far better at deploying a pen for writing than for drawing. She is a cultural anthropologist who is currently living in Lisbon, Portugal, where she has a full-time research position at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS).TwitterFacebookGoogle+Original article: Why thick data can be just as creepy as big data©2013 Erin B. Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
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