Online Transmedia Ethnography: Developing Digital Ethnographic Approaches

• In Event: Designing Live-Streaming Ecologies: Learning in and Across Synchronous Media

Abstract

How might “transmedia” approaches—or working across media—fit into the exploration of learning on live-streaming platforms, and what might it contribute to the discipline in the future? This paper explores this question through our work on Twitch where we navigated through various platforms or websites to examine youth’s practices of community building and political engagement while meaningfully engaging across multiple modalities. We appropriated youths’ practice of “transmedia navigation” to conduct our research on Twitch. We argue that transmedia ethnography evokes new questions around acceptable methodological processes and supports a growing interest in digital learning by offering diverse cross-platform spaces for engagement with subjects and audiences.

As a growing number of researchers are forced to move their work online, many have begun employing multiple digital tools in their ethnographic practices. Transmedia ethnography is one direction for such work. It involves not only the use of various digital tools or the adaptation of research practices from the analog to the digital but extending ethnographic narratives and analysis across digital platforms, with each piece contributing to a more holistic view of the learner.

This paper builds on the ideas of transmedia storytelling which refers to the “emergent forms of storytelling which tap into the flow of content across media” by using the term to explain the ethnographic practices and narratives used in examining Twitch streamer communities. We do this by asking how transmedia methods might change the ways we examine learning, engage with learners, and enable researchers to “see” while conducting ethnographic work during times of crisis. Additionally, this paper provides researchers with methods for examining everyday cultural practices across digital tools and the production and consumption of media situated in a broader digital context

The methods used to collect data were cross-platform participant observation, archival digital research, and secondary data collection. Data for this study includes video recordings of streams and field notes collected over the course of three months. These data points were triangulated and coded by four researchers to ensure inter rater reliability.

Our findings suggest that a transmedia approach to ethnographic work surfaces more nuanced understanding of digital practices, live-streaming communities, and the collective sense-making that spans multiple digital sites. As youth travel across digital sites they experiment with their surroundings, adopt multiple identities, meaningfully sample and remix media, follow the flow of information across multiple modalities, travel across diverse communities, and are exposed to multiple perspectives (Jenkins et al., 2006). These practices and knowledge are then interwoven into the fabric of each stream and continuously contested by each new member of the community. As a result, to fully understand the learner or a community, in an increasingly digital era, it is imperative to use transmedia ethnographic methods to examine the transmedia practices of youth.

Although transmedia work can be challenging and highly contingent on access, such work can expand education’s toolkit for engaging with subjects and audiences and create new opportunities to design spaces of learning.

Authors

• Sandra Jacobo, University of California - Berkeley

• Edward Rivero, University of California - Berkeley

• Jasmine Ayromlou