Where’s the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research

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dc.contributor.authorBurns, Ryan
dc.contributor.authorWark, Grace
dc.date.accessioned2020-06-02T21:01:49Z
dc.date.available2020-06-02T21:01:49Z
dc.date.issued2019-01
dc.description.abstractContemporary cities are witnessing momentous shifts in how institutions and individuals produce and circulate data. Despite recent trends claiming that anyone can create and use data, cities remain marked by persistently uneven access and usage of digital technologies. This is the case as well within the emergent phenomenon of the ‘smart city,’ where open data are a key strategy for achieving ‘smartness,’ and increasingly constitute a fundamental dimension of urban life, governance, economic activity, and epistemology. The digital ethnography has extended traditional ethnographic research practices into such digital realms, yet its applicability within open data and smart cities is unclear. The method has tended to overlook the important roles of particular digital artifacts such as the database in structuring and producing knowledge. In this paper, we develop the database ethnography as a rich methodological resource for open data research. This approach centers the database as a key site for the production and materialization of social meaning. The database ethnography draws attention to the ways digital choices and practices—around database design, schema, data models, and so on—leave traces through time. From these traces, we may infer lessons about how phenomena come to be encoded as data and acted upon in urban contexts. Open databases are, in other words, key ways in which knowledges about the smart city are framed, delimited, and represented. More specifically, we argue that open databases limit data types, categorize and classify data to align with technical specifications, reflect the database designer’s episteme, and (re)produce conceptions of the world. We substantiate these claims through a database ethnography of the open data portal for the city of Calgary, in Western Canada.en_US
dc.identifier.citationBurns, R., & Wark, G. (2019). Where’s the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data research. "Qualitative Research". pp. 1-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468794119885040en_US
dc.identifier.doihttp://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1468794119885040en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1880/112145
dc.identifier.urihttps://doi.org/10.11575/PRISM/43650
dc.publisherSAGE : Qualitative Researchen_US
dc.publisher.departmentGeographyen_US
dc.publisher.facultyArtsen_US
dc.publisher.hasversionpublishedVersionen_US
dc.publisher.institutionUniversity of Calgaryen_US
dc.rightsUnless otherwise indicated, this material is protected by copyright and has been made available with authorization from the copyright owner. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission.en_US
dc.subjectDatabase ethnographyen_US
dc.subjectDigital ethnographyen_US
dc.subjectopen dataen_US
dc.subjectSmart citiesen_US
dc.subjectCanadaen_US
dc.subjectKnowledge politicsen_US
dc.titleWhere’s the database in digital ethnography? Exploring database ethnography for open data researchen_US
ucalgary.item.requestcopytrueen_US
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