The Digitalization of Ethnography: A Scoping Review of Methods in Netnography

Abstract

The article focuses on the digital transposition of ethnography (e.g., digital ethnography or netnography) which is not a homogeneous approach. In the last few years, various attempts have been made of considering digital fields in ethnographic research producing an internally diverse array of approaches. Differences emerge with reference to objects (digital cultures), research field (contextual fields: blogs, forums, and communities VS decontextualized narratives aggregated through tags or a hashtags), access to the field (covert or overt), observational strategies and data analysis (text analysis VS hermeneutics). The article investigates such an array of approaches through a scoping review of the existing digital ethnographic research (selected in Web of Science and Scopus) to map methodological differences. The main goal is to systematize an extensive set of research design and analysis differences in order to discuss how the nature of participant observation is changing in digital spaces and how to resist the tendency to decontextualize culture and humanities.