Ethnography is a technique that anthropologists use to understand how a social group or community thinks, feels and sees the world.
Ethnographers do participant-observation, spending a lot of time in the social environment that they are studying. As a result ethnography is really good at capturing nuances and understanding how and why communities behave the way they do.
With this training, we want to move away from the idea of ethnography as a lone practice. We want to introduce you to a new way of research, open and collective, that we call Collective Ethnography.
We have developed a new tool, Open Ethnographer that we use for doing this and we believe that it enables a powerful and scalable way to allow online collaboration and find deeper discoveries in data analysis.
Your Instructor
Amelia Hassoun is a PhD student at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her research analyses the design, development, and usage of sensor technologies embedded in Singapore’s urban landscape as part of its Smart Nation project, as well as the social life of the data they produce. Her current focus is on smart home technologies. Her research interests include smart cities, digital and medical anthropology, RFID and sensor networks, healthcare technologies, and the social effects of technological change more broadly.
Amelia holds an MSc in Digital Anthropology from University College London as well as a BA in Anthropology from Yale University. Her Master’s research at UCL examined the life cycles of patient data and software systems in the NHS, and her senior thesis at Yale on communication technologies in hospice care emerged from collaboration with UCL’s Why We Post Project. Prior to her doctoral studies, Amelia worked as a patient website developer in London, as well as a senior researcher at Edgeryders on its Open Care project.