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Laboratory ethnography during a pandemic
On my research blog dhinfra.org, you can find my new post “Laboratory ethnography during a pandemic: On temporality, instability and co-production“. I reflect on methodological and ethical challenges of doing an ethnography during these difficult times. Drawing on my ethnographic study at King’s Digital Lab, I have produced the following principles for approaching a laboratory ethnography during a pandemic: permanent temporality, planned spontaneity, a mixture of work and home, and instability of environment. These preliminary concepts reveal the strangeness of the contemporary moment that makes it difficult to apply standard ethnographic methods. The strangeness of these aspects, unsettling now, might however become an intrinsic part of an emerging new type of “post-pandemic” ethnography we don’t know yet. I also argue that a pandemic situation can help to disclose knowledge about the community and workplace that otherwise would remain hidden and unnoticed. Critical situations can say a lot about labs’ culture and community. This is the time for sharpening a sensibility for things that are exposed: care, trust, and collectivity. Further, I pose the following questions: How do workplaces re-prioritize their work in light of challenges? What is the most important goal for a lab during the crisis? What does a lab do to reconcile individual concerns and management requirements to “keep the lab going”? How is a “lab culture” evinced in strategies adopted in the face of an emergency? These set of questions might become part of the methodological guidance for the ethnography of laboratories in unstable times. You can find the essay here.
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“DH Lab” book
I am excited to share that my book “Digital Humanities and Laboratories: Perspectives on Knowledge, Infrastructure and Culture”, I am editing together with Dr Christopher Thomson (University of Canterbury), has been accepted by Routledge. The collection will be published as one of research titles in the Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities series.
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dhinfra.org
I’ve recently launched a research blog dhinfra.org related to my ongoing Marie Skłodowska-Curie project. I’ll share there my activities and outputs of this research and also publish posts about digital humanities infrastructure, scholarly knowledge production, and methodological approaches to the study of infrastructure.
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What is happening behind the text?
I have joined King’s Digital Lab (KDL) as a Marie Curie Research Fellow to conduct an ethnographic study of digital humanists at work, combined with a critical analysis of local infrastructure. KDL is a unique lab that is made up of Research Software Engineers (RSEs) who work on technical research solutions for conducting digital research in the humanities and social sciences. What a RSE-based digital humanities lab can tell us about humanities knowledge production?
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Infrastructure of Engagement
I am happy to share that my new open access essay “A Laboratory as the Infrastructure of Engagement: Epistemological Reflections” has been published in Open Library of Humanities (2020, 6.2). Check it out here.
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