Digital Ethnography Field Kit
A research-design companion for studying online and hybrid communities. Frame your field, choose your methods, and the kit assembles a fieldwork protocol while surfacing the reflexivity and ethics questions that responsible digital ethnography demands — a planning aid distilled from KBA13 Insight’s field-methods writing.
1 · The Field
Digital fields are constructed, not found. Name yours.
2 · Research Question
One focused, answerable question anchors the design.
3 · Positionality
How do you enter the field?
4 · Methods
Select each technique you intend to use.
Reflexivity & Ethics Prompts
Fieldwork Protocol
A skeleton sequence, assembled from your choices.
- –Complete the panel to generate steps.
Why a kit, not a template
Digital ethnography cannot be pre-packaged. Every field is made through the researcher’s choices — of platform, stance, and method — and each choice carries consequences for what can be known and who is exposed. This kit refuses to hide those consequences: it pairs every method with the reflexive and ethical question it raises.
- The field is an effect of your framing, not a place you arrive at.
- Presence changes the field — even lurking is a stance with effects.
- Consent and harm online are unsettled; the kit prompts, it does not absolve.
Read it responsibly
This kit designs nothing on its own. It organises your decisions and raises questions a thoughtful supervisor would ask.