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.