Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of digital ethnography based on Tom Boellstoff’s “Rethinking Digital Anthropology” (2012), comparing it to visual analysis.
In the fourth chapter of Rethinking Digital Anthropology, Tom Boellstoff (2012) explores the relationship between the virtual and the real in the first part. In the second part, the author studies anthropology through the cases in the virtual world “Second Life” game. In the third part, the author analyzes the theory of the first part…
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of visual analysis based on Roland Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” (1981), comparing it to discourse analysis.
The Camera Lucida was Roland Barthes’ last work in 1981. The book seems to be composed of delirious thinking and scattered essays, but in fact, a kind of phenomenological thinking throughout. In this way of de-theorizing, conceptualizing, and systematizing, Barthes constructed his unique theoretical framework of visual analysis, namely “Get back to Photography” (p.7). In…
Reading Reflection on Cockfight
After reading Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, what most impresses me is that Cifford Geertz discoursed: “Societies, like lives, contain their own interpretations. One has to learn how to gain access to them.” It means that if we need to understand and know about the culture a society conveys, it is essential to…
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of digital ethnography based on Tom Boellstoff’s “Rethinking Digital Anthropology” (2012)
In the article “Rethinking digital anthropology”, Tom Boellstoff (2012) attempts to figure out the complex relationships between the virtual (the online) and the actual (the physical or offline), as he defined the digital anthropology ‘an approach to researching the virtual’ (Boellstoff, 2012, p.40). He concerns on a mistaken belief that the virtual and the actual…
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of digital ethnography based on Tom Boellstoff’s “Rethinking Digital Anthropology” (2012), comparing it to visual analysis.
Within his rethinking around understandings of digital anthropology, Tom Boellstoff (2012) presumes knowledge of ethnography on behalf of the reader. Therefore, to offer a definition: ‘ethnography is not a single method but an approach that draws on numerous sources – observation, interviews, documents, artefacts – while maintaining a focus on how people experience their daily…
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of visual analysis based on Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida
In Roland Barthes’s book Camera Lucida (2000), he talked about visual analysis by focusing on his own perspectives of photograph and photography, instead of talking more about photograph technologically and professionally. His book is more like a “diary” that can be read in spare time and can bring some thoughts at the same time. He…
What pictures convey
A picture is a message. Take the press photograph as an instance. “ Considered overall this message is formed by a source of emission, a channel of transmission is the staff of the newspaper, the group of technicians certain of whom take the photo, some of whom choose, compose and treat it, while others, finally,…
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of visual analysis based on Roland Barthes’ “Camera Lucida” (1981), comparing it to discourse analysis.
In Camera Lucida (1981), Roland Barthes offers an unconscious account of visual analysis in practice. “Unconscious” is appropriate to this discussion as he does not define visual analysis. Regarding this, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (1998) comment that visual images are ‘central to how we represent, make meaning, and communicate with the world around us’ (p.1). Hence, visual analysis becomes…
What are the particular difficulties that researchers face when there are no step by step procedures to follow, yet there is a requirement for the systematic analysis of a dataset?
When having no step by step procedures to follow in the process of discourse analysis, the researchers are facing many difficulties. Discourse analysis mainly focus on language and texts, in which social meanings, social identities and social facts are formed and reproduced (Tonkiss, 2018). Through the discourse analysis, it examines how ideologies are reproduced by…
What are the particular difficulties that researchers face when there are no step by step procedures to follow, yet there is a requirement for the systematic analysis of a dataset?
In definition of discourse analysis, theorist Fran Tonkiss (2018) notes that there are key difficulties facing researchers who utilise this method. Overall, discourse analysis acts as an insight into the effects of ‘speech and texts’ on the shaping and reproduction of knowledge and social meaning (p.478). When considering critical or political discourse analysis, this method can further…
Obstacles researchers facing without gradual procedures
There will be great difficulties for researchers to analyze a dataset without step by step procedures. According to what we’ve read in Cartographies of Knowledge, Celine-Marie Pascale discourses that on one hand, they must develop critiques of existing paradigms and on the other they must develop research that demonstrates the strength of the new frameworks(2010,…
The difficult researchers face in analyzing the data-bias
As for the analysis of data, without specific steps, it will not be straightforward to operate. As for the difficulties in data processing, Tonkiss thinks they mainly focus on the following points: defining research problems, selecting and obtaining data, classifying, compiling, and analyzing data. I want to focus on the “Sorting, coding, and analyzing data”…
MCS Group One 