Publications - Digital Ethnography Research Centre

Digital Domesticity: Media, Materiality, and Home Life

Tracing the origins of digital developments within a domestic setting, Jenny Kennedy, Michael Arnold, Martin Gibbs, Bjorn Nansen, and Rowan Wilken advance media domestication research through an ecology-based approach to the abundance and materiality of media in the home. The book locates digital domesticity through phases of adoption and dwelling, to management and housekeeping, to obsolescence and disposal.

Digital Food: From Paddock to Platform

Digital Food offers the first critical account of the impact of digital information, media, and communication technologies on the topic of food. The book critically analyzes how our relationship to food consumption, production, and politics is being re-mediated through digitally connected electronic devices, practices and content.

Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life

Digital Media, Sharing and Everyday Life provides nuanced accounts of the processes of sharing in digital culture and the complexities that arise in them. The book explores definitions of sharing, and the roles that our digital devices and the platforms we use play in these practices.

Exploring Minecraft: Ethnographies of Play and Creativity

This book seeks to take Minecraft seriously as a cultural practice. At the intersection of digital media, quotidian literacy and ethnography Exploring Minecraft situates interdisciplinary debates around mundane play through the lens of Minecraft.

The essays collected here are based on two decades of engagement with the residents of the slums of Govindpuri in India’s capital, Delhi. The book presents stories of many kinds, from speculative treatises, via the recollection of a thousand everyday conversations, to an account of the making of a radio documentary.

Ambient Play

Through innovative ethnographic methods, we show that as mobile games spread across different genres, platforms, practices, and contexts, they become an important way of experiencing and navigating a digitally saturated world.

Combining media industry analysis with cultural theory, Ramon Lobato explores the political and policy tensions at the heart of the digital distribution revolution, tracing their longer history through our evolving understanding of media globalization.

James Meese views authors, users, and pirates as interconnected subjects in this book, analyzing them as a relational triad. He argues that addressing the relationships among the three subjects will shed light on how the key conceptual underpinnings of copyright law are justified in practice.

The irruption of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Snowden and other tech-savvy actors onto the global political stage raises urgent questions about the impact of digital activism on political systems around the world. The Rise of Nerd Politics is an anthropological exploration of the role that such actors play in sparking and managing new processes of political change in the digital age.

This edited collection interrogates the diversity of transnational migration experiences in the Asia-Pacific through the lens of digital ethnography in order to explore the transformative effects digital media plays in these experiences.

Death and Digital Media provides a critical overview of how people mourn, commemorate and interact with the dead through digital media.

Investigating the convergence between locative, mobile and social media in order to show how people use mobile media for their creative practice—creative writing, photography, video and filmmaking.

Haunting Hands looks closely at the consequences of digital media’s ubiquitous presence in our lives, in particular the representing, sharing, and remembering of loss. From Facebook tribute pages during public disasters to the lingering digital traces on a smartphone of the deceased, the digital is both extending earlier memorial practices and creating new ways in which death and loss manifest themselves.

Screen Ecologies examines the relationship of media, art, and climate change in the Asia-Pacific region—a key site of both environmental degradation and the production and consumption of climate-aware screen art and media.

Digital ethnography is central to our understanding of the social world; it can shape methodology and methods, and provides the technological tools needed to research society.