posted on 2016-03-07, 14:09authored byMurray Goulden, Christian Greiffenhagen, Jon Crowcroft, Derek McAuley, Richard Mortier, Milena Radenkovic, Arjuna Sathiaseelan
Drawing on the experiences of a novel collaborative project between sociologists and computer scientists, this paper identifies a set of challenges for fieldwork that are generated by this wild interdisciplinarity. Public Access Wi-Fi Service (PAWS) was a project funded by
an 'in-the-wild' research programme, involving the study of digital technologies within a marginalised community, with the goal of addressing digital exclusion. We argue that similar forms of research, in which social scientists are involved in the deployment of experimental technologies within real world settings, are becoming increasingly prevalent. The fieldwork
for the project was highly problematic, with the result that few users of the system were
successfully enrolled. We analyse why this was the case, identifying three sets of issues which emerge in the juxtaposition of interdisciplinary collaboration and wild setting. We conclude with a set of recommendations for projects involving technologists and social scientists.
History
School
Social Sciences
Department
Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies
Published in
International Journal of Social Research Methodology
Citation
GOULDEN, M. ...et al., 2017. Wild Interdisciplinarity: Ethnography and Computer Science. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 20 (2) pp.137-150.
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publication date
2017
Notes
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.