Situated Watching: The Virtual Vortex of Ethnography Videos
Preparing my course on “Ethnographies of Computing Environments”, today, I found a fantastic TEDxBroadway talk by Ellen Isaacs on ethnography.
I was just searching for a short clip to watch with my students in order to complement the discussion of the otherwise purely text based introduction to ethnography (see my post from last week).
In addition to that, each of the three full day seminar sessions takes place online exclusively via video conferencing. That means, you have to plan for little escapes from the virtual conference room to prevent otherwise unbearably long and exhaustive video call sessions as I am sure everybody knows by now. So, I was also looking for ways to break up the longer segments into little chunks of the usual presentations and discussions but also fun little activities and well: videos.
At first, I was skeptical since there are many inadequate representations of what ethnography and participant observation are and I must admit, I did not know Ellen Isaacs, but when she started her talk with some demonstrations of terminal commands (I do remember ls and mv out of my head), I found myself intrigued by the question of how she might draw the line from there to speaking to a general public about ethnography.
She continued with quite a good sense of humor to compare that command line navigation and file manipulation to the ease of use a graphical user interface (GUI) provides. I was simultaneously slightly irritated and totally hooked by her talk at that point because, while I actually still like using the command line - as probably most developers do - and did not entirely agree with its depiction as an outdated precursor of GUIs, I was anticipating where she might be going with introducing Doug Engelbart’s and Alan Kay’s groundbreaking work (invention of GUIs and the computer mouse) at Xerox PARC.
This anticipation was building up because there is another hugely influential figure, I immediately associate with Xerox PARC and ethnography whom I would count to my personal academic heroes, Lucy Suchman.
Could Ellen Isaacs actually be preparing a segue to talk about Suchman’s research at Xerox PARC? That research and the resulting book “Plans and Situated Action” are a brilliant study of how people actually use or try to use a new model of a copying machine that came with an expert help system and the high hopes for it to achieve the task of explaining itself to its users. In detailed accounts, Suchman presents and analyzes the many troubled interactions and misunderstandings between humans and machines. But it doesn’t even end there because Suchman’s work did not only become tremendously influential in human computer interaction (HCI) but also addressed basic questions in AI and cognitive science with its main argument that human action and communication is not the execution of a previously thought out plan or a rational decision making process but the unfolding of situational events that most strongly adhere to the available resources and procedures in that situation. I think her arguments can still contribute a lot to current AI discussions. And at some point, I “plan” on collecting my reading notes into a more extensive excerpt.
But back to the TEDx talk. After me just nerding out about this inspiring Anthropologist and her early work, you can imagine that I was really excited when Isaacs did actually summarize Suchman’s work and even showed a short clip from her video tapes. I think you should definitely watch her talk and see for yourself. But what I found particularly sympathetic about that talk was that Isaacs gave so much credit and time to focus on and celebrate the work of someone else. Even more so since her own work seemed really fascinating as well. I had a good laugh at the mindbogglingly complicated signs “designed” (“de-signed” would be the more appropriate pronounciation) to inform car drivers on the streets of NYC, in the seconds of passing by, whether they are allowed to park in a specific spot. I really liked Isaacs’ and her teams ideas and solutions for that problem. And I will put her work on my ever growing reading list.
Take some time an watch that talk. If you liked the post, the actual talk by Isaacs is way more engaging. 
Like every good researcher and developer, after watching this video, I fell into the famous youtube recommendation vortex and found a few more interesting videos on conversation analysis and doing ethnography online during pandemic times. I will link those below. Take care and stay out of those vortexes. 
- TEDx talk by Elizabeth Stokoe on conversation analysis
- Daniel Miller on doing ethnography online during a pandemic
- Sarah Pink on digital ethnography
I’m just realizing that what I was doing today could be called: “situated watching”. But even more irritating to me, in my writing I am a kind of relay reccomender system. So, now machines tell me what to do? But why am I listening? Those machines don’t do, so why should I? Anyway, let’s not get carried away.