Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Use of Digital Ethnography to Understand Violence

SES-1029910 Mitchell DuneierJeffrey LanePrinceton UniversityEthnographers努力捕捉他们研究的群体的社会生活的丰富而精确的数据，但当他们专注于面对面的参与者观察时，错过了当代生活的数字组成部分。 与其他地方的社会生活一样，内城生活的日常流动也在线上和线下空间之间交替，这就要求民族志学者相应地移动，以检索群体成员相互展示的基本互动和自我表征。 这篇关于纽约哈莱姆青年工作人员（有时称为“帮派”）的数字生活的论文通过捕捉、整合和解释人们同时生活的物理城市和数字空间中发生的事情，推进了城市民族志领域的数据收集和数据质量。 方法的目标是创建一个新的城市民族志模型，补充和综合传统的民族志数据，这些数据来自面对面的观察和在物理现场的互动-现场笔记和录音-与多媒体内容，包括社交媒体网站（即，简档、朋友网络以及评论或对话）和来自文本消息的对话文本位。 研究人员将这些新的方法论工具应用于理解数字时代暴力的实质性和理论性目标。 哈莱姆的青年工作人员过着广泛的数字生活，在网上与同龄人交流音乐、性、日常生活，有时还包括暴力。 当船员在Twitter等社交媒体网站上发出威胁或协调对抗时，这些交流有时会导致暴力。 暴力如何发生或传播反映了复杂的过程，从参与者的社会历史到对抗者以及其他观看互动的人如何解释在线评论，即监视神职人员，关心的居民和警察等成年人。 更广泛的影响。 本论文的研究将帮助我们了解如何以及为什么关注暴力的哈莱姆居民-那些犯下和应对暴力-从事数字媒体的方式，他们这样做，以找出什么是什么是不一样的暴力在数字世界。 该研究提出了创新形式的数据和数据收集技术，并整合了在线和离线数据和观察，以了解具有主要社会重要性的离线结果，即人际暴力。

SES-1029910Mitchell DuneierJeffrey LanePrinceton UniversityEthnographers strive to capture rich and precise data about the social lives of the groups they study but miss the digital components of contemporary life when they focus squarely on face-to-face participant observation. The daily flow of inner city life, like social life elsewhere, alternates between online and offline spaces, requiring ethnographers to move accordingly to retrieve essential interactions and representations of self that group members display for one another. This dissertation on digital lives of youth crews (sometimes called "gangs") in Harlem, New York advances data collection and data quality in the field of urban ethnography by capturing, integrating, and interpreting what happens in both the physical city and the digital spaces where people concurrently live. The methodological objective is to create a new model for urban ethnography that supplements and synthesizes conventional ethnographic data drawn from face-to-face observation and interaction in a physical field site--fieldnotes and audio recordings--with the multimedia content that comprises social media sites (i.e., a profile, network of friends, and comments or conversations) and conversational bits of text from text messages. The researcher applies these new methodological tools to the substantive and theoretical goal of understanding violence in the digital era. Members of youth crews in Harlem live vast digital lives, communicating online with peers about music, sex, daily life, and, sometimes, violence. When crew members make threats or coordinate confrontations on social media sites like Twitter, these exchanges sometimes result in violence. How violence transpires or is diffused reflects complex processes from the social histories of those involved to how online comments are interpreted by the antagonists as well others watching the interaction, namely monitoring adults like clergy, concerned residents, and police. Broader Impacts. This dissertation research will help us to understand how and why Harlem residents concerned with violence--those perpetrating and responding to violence--engage digital media in the ways they do to find out what is and what is not different about violence in a digital world. The research presents innovative forms of data and data collection techniques, and integrates online and offline data and observation to understand an offline outcome of primary social importance,interpersonal violence.