Computer-Mediated Anthropology
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An Online Resource Center |
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CMA Methodology: Hypertext Ethnography and Virtual Realities by Noah Porter, 2004 |
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Why bother experimenting with hypertext ethnographies? Panagakos (2003) noted that a lack of involvement by anthropologists on the Internet leads to difficulties in finding trustworthy, reliable anthropological information. A lack of involvement allows tourist websites to dominate web searches about particular cultures. And, besides these negative consequences that result from a lack of involvement, hypertext ethnographies offer the benefit of creating a virtual reality. Perhaps this form of virtual reality will lack the interactive nature of some many video games in the marketplace today, but it may offer an opportunity for for a higher degree of interaction with the ethnography and sensory immersion than most monographs offer. Douglas Harper wrote: ...the electronic revolution is a great deal more than the ability to alter photographic or video images... As is common knowledge today, the Web is organized so that viewers can create their own paths through text, images, and even film or video clips. The most successful current example is Peter Biella, Napoleon Chagnon, and Gary Seaman's (1997) interactive CD-ROM of the anthropological film The Axe Fight, by Timothy Asch, and additional hyperlinked materials. The interactive CD allows a viewer to view the actual film in any of several possible ways (in real time, backward as well as forward, frame by frame, in slow motion, or keyed to significant moments as identified by the anthropologists). The viewer can also link to scene-by-scene descriptions of the film, or can link to any individual shown in the filmto get information on that person's age, sex, spouses, death, place in the kin systems (presented in kin charts), and other anthropological details. The CD contains complete footage and edited versions of the film, hundreds of photographs, and several full-length essays. The viewer can access any part of the film and digress to any of several analyses. [Harper 2000:720] While using a CD-ROM would give faster transfer speeds and more storage than one is likely to have on a web site, there's nothing preventing using the web to create worthwhile ethnographies. Here's an example: The Maithil Brahmins: An Online Ethnography. It seems there is now even a software package called HyperBuilder specifically designed to create ethnographies like this. Although it cannot be called an ethnography, I have found that nycmap.com shows potential. The author explains the purpose of the site thusly: This project is a sort of virtual guide to the most interesting parts of New York City (at least from my point of view). But it isn't a guide in the usual sense. While "walking" through these Web pages you can, as you choose, find yourself "standing" on a particular street, you can walk or go by subway direction you want, you can meet people and even "talk to them". In contrast to traditional maps, the aim of NYCMap is not to document the layout of the city or point out its most famous tourist attractions. With the NYCMap I've tried to capture the atmosphere, the energy, or that Something which I think makes New York City so curiously different from other cities with skyscrapers. At the same time, this project is my personal diary, a document of time I spent there since 1999. Unlike the The Maithil Brahmins site, nycmap.com takes advantage of the web's capability for sound. Also, nycmap.com allows the user to move around the virtual representation of the landscape, giving the viewer a greater sense of versimilitude. (In fairness, The Maithil Brahmins site does do this to a very limited degree on their Brahman Compound page.) How do I know that a greater sense of versimilitude is achieved? I interviewed a native New Yorker to get her opinion on the page (not to say that one New Yorker can speak for all of them, of course): Noah: Take a look at it... As a native New Yorker, I wanted your opinion on how well it captures the "look and feel" of the city. The applications and implications of nonlinear, hypertext ethnographic representations have been explored by several anthropologists (Ardevol 2002; Barkin & Stone 2000; Brown 2003; Fagan 2000; Farnell & Huntley 1995; Houtman & Zeitlyn 1996; Schwimmer 1997; Stanlaw & Peterson 2003; Stone 1998; Trias i. Valls 2002; Zeitlyn 1998). A quick, partial summary of the points they raise may be in order: · The data the anthropologist used in his or her analysis and conclusion can be made available to others, resulting in greater scholarly communication and increased empirical transparency (Barkin & Stone 2000: 126, 129-130; Brown 2003; Houtman & Zeitlyn 1996; Stone 1998: 7-8; Zeitlyn 1998) · Some feel hypertext is leading to "the incipient erosion in the standards of quality of scholarship" (Barkin & Stone 2000: 130) · The Internet is a cost-effective means of publication with fewer space constraints which can be used to supplement printed materials as well as stand on its own; (Barkin & Stone 2000: 126; Brown 2003; Stanlaw & Peterson 2003) however, it is not free and costs may vary over time (Stanlaw & Peterson 2003), and the use of high-quality pictures, sounds, and video may deter Internet users with slow connections (Brown 2003) · New materials can be cited and/or reviewed much quicker than would be possible for print publication (Stanlaw & Peterson 2003) · Hypertext publications have the potential to be seen by a much wider audience (Stanlaw & Peterson 2003) · Libraries are decreasing their stock of printed materials (Stanlaw & Peterson 2003; Stone 1998: 4), so Internet publications give the anthropologist control over the availability of the availability of the (hyper)text (Stanlaw & Peterson 2003) · Printed materials tend to be taken more seriously than hypertext materials (Stanlaw & Peterson 2003) · Some feel that printed materials offer "covenience and aesthetics" that cannot be duplicated by looking at the screen or printing out the web page (Stanlaw & Peterson 2003), while others claim that "The printed Web page has all the advantages of an offprint" (Stone 1998: 9) and that the process of transferring the hypertext document to a printed document merely loses the dynamic nature of hypertext (p. 9) · Hypertext offers the possibility of color graphics, which is a rarity in social science journals (Barkin & Stone 2000: 128-9; Stone 1998: 7) · Hypertext offers the possibility of using sounds (Barkin & Stone 2000: 129; Stone 1998: 7) · Hypertext offers the potential to see video of the informants, and in some cases, "to reduce...vibrant microcosms of motion to the status of static photographs in a book seemed nothing less than sacrilegious" (Farnell & Huntley 1995: 7) · Some have expressed concern that hypertext documents "may allow sound and image to overcome scholarly substance" (Barkin & Stone 2000: 130) · The user is empowered to decide between multiple paths in hypertext, rather than being contrained to a unilinear path like in traditional ethnographic monographs (Barkin & Stone 2000: 129; Farnell & Huntley 1995: 8; Scwimmer 1997; Stone 1998: 6-7; Trias i Valls 2002: 44-5;) · As a result of the user being given multiple paths to choose from, the hypertext ethnography can be custom-tailored to fit multiple audiences (Farnell & Huntley 1995: 8; Stanlaw & Peterson 2003; Schwimmer 1997) · When a hypertext ethnography is done as an adjunct to a traditional monograph, problems with the publisher may result, including CD ROMs with unreasonable price tags (Farnell & Huntley 1995: 8) or concerns that the hypertext ethnography may adversely effect the sales of the monograph (Brown 2003) · Websites, depending on their design, can require time-consuming construction and maintenance (Brown 2003; Stone 1998: 9); otherwise, they will fail to take advantage of the capabilities that hypertext offers (Stone 1998: 9) and offer outdated information (e.g. discussing Napoleon Chagnon without mentioning the "Darkness in El Dorado" controversy) (Panagakos 2003) · The intellectual property issues involved with using other people's materials can be unclear (Brown 2003; Jacobson 1999) · Hypertext materials have the potential for more active participation with the materials, resulting in greater engagement with them. (Fagan 2000) · Hypertext materials in the classroom can preserve engagement with the materials at a time when increased class sizes are making this more difficult (Ardevol 2002; Fagan 2000; Trias i Valls 2002; Zeitlyn 1998) · Hypertext materials, because of their dynamic nature, can raise doubts about the author originally said after subsequent modifications (Stone 1998: 8) (Note that Stone seems unaware of the Internet WayBack Machine, which largely addresses his concerns. However, it does not completely address them because the site has many gaps in its coverage.) · A failure to indicate what a hypertext link connects to can be problematic for web scholarship (Stone 1998: 8-9) Lombard et. al (2000) describe six dimensions of presence. I contend that this theoretical framework may be useful in parsing out some issues related to turning hypertext into virtual reality: 1. Presence as Social Richness - "the 'warmth' or 'intimacy' possible via a medium" 2. Presence as Realism - "perceptual and/or social" 3. Presence as Transportation - "the sensations of 'you are there,' 'it is here,' and/or 'we are together'" 4. Presence as Immersion - "in a mediated environment" 5. Presence as a Social Actor Within Medium - "e.g. parasocial interaction" 6. Presence as Medium as Social Actor - "e.g. treating computers as social entities" In reviewing the literature on hypertext ethnography, we might first divide discussions into issues of practicality and issues of presence. Brown's (2003) discussion of dealing with his publisher's concerns about with website would fall into the former category, while Schwimmer's (1997) discussion of multilayering and multistranding would fall into the latter, most likely under Presence as (Psychological) Immersion category in Lomard et al's (2000) typology. The challenges for hypertext ethnography requires that all of these points be addressed. The practical issues of economics and maintaining a critical scholarship must be addressed at the same time as anthropologists discover techniques for enhancing the different types of presence in hypertext ethnographies so that engaging, intellectually-challenging virtual realities are created that reflect anthropological sensibilities. References Cited Ardevol, Elisenda Barkin, Gareth, and Glenn Davis Stone Brown, Michael F. Fagan, Brian Farnell, Brenda; Huntley, Joan Harper, Dougles Houtman, G., and D. Zeitlyn Jacobson, David Lombard, Matthew, Theresa B. Ditton, Daliza Crane, Bill Davis, Karl Horvath, and Jessica Rossman Panagakos, Anastasia Schwimmer, Brian Stanlaw, James, and Mark Peterson Stone, Glenn Davis Trias i Valls, Ma Angels Zeitlyn, David |
