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

Abstract

Contemporary 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.

Smart cities: Who cares?

“…In what follows, we draw on a discourse analysis (Jørgensen and Phillips, 2002) of promotional material and mission statements of organizations taking leading roles in emerging open data ecosystems, a small part of a much bigger, ongoing 4-year extended case method (Burawoy, 1998) and database ethnography (Schuurman, 2008) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The methods of the project as a whole are more precisely detailed elsewhere, but in short, the research project, while centered on Calgary, "follows" the digital traces of ideas through other places that have influenced Calgary's smart city and open data approach (Burns and Wark, 2019). 6 This has contributed to our thinking a broad geographical framing and familiarity with a number of organizations.…”

Korean mothers’ morality in the wake of COVID-19 contact-tracing surveillance

“…This research is based on “database digital ethnography,” which views the digital database as a core site for the production of social meaning ( Burns and Wark, 2020 ). We collected and analyzed comments (N = 3729) from January to May 2020 made by Korean mothers on the travel histories of virus patients on 15 internet groups called “mom cafes,” of which 14 were in Seoul and one was nationwide.…”

Governing cities as more-than-human entities

“…The present paper concerns how "dog data" interface with rules to minimise dog-bite injuries in urban areas. In doing so, we take up "digital ethnography" (Burns and Wark 2019) as a valuable approach for the analysis of policies and governmental rationalities. Digital ethnography' s premise is rooted in science and technology studies (STS): it views technology as imbricated onto human values and epistemologies (Star 1999).…”