This next tutorial is on Ethnography: Thick and Thin being presented by Ken Anderson of Intel and Paul Dourish of UC Irvine. According to Marilyn Strathern, Cambridge, ethnography is "the deliberate attempt to generate more data than the investigator is aware of at the time of collection". Ethnography has started since the 1910s, even further than computer science, with anthropology. People think of ethnography as a tool for studying long-term studies and participatory observation. Ethnography is about not just about capturing the experience, but taking that experience, and determining how this experience can relate to the real world. So, ethnography is not about replicating the experience, making you become part of the culture that you're studying. Tom's talk talked about just because you can do this, doesn't mean that you should, whereas with this talk, just because you should doesn't mean that you can which is the opposite.
Ethnographic data is interpreted, and I believe that culture is important in understanding, deploying and evaluating ubiquitous computing systems. When you deploy a ubicomp system, how is this going to affect the culture? If it starts breaking culture, people won't use it. The systems need to be embedded within the culture, without disrupting it. Ethnography is about writing about people, after the things happen not during. The ethnographer has two roles: one as author and one as participant. So what does ethnography have to do within ubiquitous computing, we can think of technology as a site of social and cultural production. What are the good questions to ask of an ethnography? What are the empirical claims? What theoretical claims are made? How does this contribute to the corpus? What was the context of production?
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