Introduction

In this Editor’s Introduction we outline the nine rubrics and the attendant 44 chapters that constitute the current state of digital ethnography research. We conclude by introducing three provocations for the future of digital ethnography. The Companion begins with a section dedicated to Debating Digital Ethnography that contextualizes contemporary debates about the consequences of digital media technologies for ethnographic practice from different disciplinary vantage points. The first chapter by anthropologists Mike Fortun, Kim Fortun, and George E. Marcus provides a short history of computers in anthropology that stems back to Clifford and Marcus’ Writing Culture (a seminal text in defining the politics and practices of ethnography and fieldwork) to contextualize new modes of ethnographic research, collaboration, and expression. Similarly, sociologist Christine Hine draws from a decade and a half of ethnographies focused on the Internet to consider how digital media cultures have shaped ethnography as a practice, reflecting upon the changes and continuity within the academy. Science and Technology Studies scholar Anne Beaulieu follows Hine with a discussion of how computationalization shapes some of the adaptations of ethnographic methods, a framework that ethnomusicologist Wendy F. Hsu also explores through her discussion of performance. Hsu further questions “the purpose of writing as the predominant expression of ethnographic knowledge” within the context of digital media