IRISS '98: Ethnomethodology and the Study of Online Communities: Exploring the Cyber Streets Textual Analysis and Ethnography
Ethnographies have always taken advantage of written materials from a culture, but that has usually formed only a part of the evidence for analysis. Online communities present the researcher with nothing but text. The ethnographer cannot observe people, other than through their textual contributions to a forum. All behavior is verbal in the form of text. There are no other artifacts to analyze other than text. Interviewing presents possibilities to meet people in person, but given the dispersed geographical nature of most current online communities, interviewing must usually be done online, again via text.
This necessary emphasis on text presents both opportunities and severe limits. In one sense, there is less for the ethnographer to miss in a text-based world of interaction. All speech, behavior, community rules, and community history is, in principle, likely to be available online for the researcher's inspection. This may make the task seem deceptively easy. A researcher could sit down at his or her own computer, browse through a community's archive, monitor current postings, and have the world's easiest fieldwork conditions.