Blogging as a research tool

The EASA Media Anthropology Network is organizing an e-seminar on Erkan Saka‘s working paper entitled Blogging as a research tool for ethnographic fieldwork. The paper will be made available in due time, but in the mean time, here’s the abstract.

This presentation argues that blogging emerges as a new research tool for the ones conducting ethnographic fieldwork. Moreover, I argue throughout my paper that new media with a particular emphasis in blogging will have even larger consequences for the discipline of anthropology. In order to substantiate my main argument I focus on these issues:
a) Blogging might be a remedy to the anxiety of being in ‘after the fact’ that is shared by many anthropologists. Blogging takes place in the present tense while actively engaging with ‘the fact’;
b) blogging brings immediate feedback
c) not only from the limited scholarly circles but from a wider public/audience
d) which exposes the ethnographer to a much more effective issue of accountability.
Moreover, e) blogging urges to see motives in a more regular sense, thus creates a strong sense of regularity
f) that forces the ethnographer to produce on a regular basis
g) with a constant appeal to narrate what would normally remain fragments of fieldnotes. In addition to depending on scholarly sources of interest, this paper exploits the presenter’s own experience of blogging during his fieldwork.