Like Jelana and Lilian, my research proposal relates to
online content. They have already written a fair bit about the nature of fieldwork
in this context, and there is little I can add to the aspects of this type of
fieldwork that they have talked about.
There is one other aspect of this topic, however, which I
find very interesting. The internet is constantly changing, and what is
available for a researcher to actually examine at any particular point in time
can be easily lost. It can become increasingly difficult for a researcher who
is trying to do fieldwork to go back and check their own work, or to see if the
evidence they have gathered is actually enough.
Internet archiving is one method of actually storing the
content being created on the internet, and documenting this increasingly
central aspect of our society is only going to become more important as time
goes on. In the case of a forum-type environment, which my research proposal is
based around, the methods for capturing these web pages do not always work. The
update schedules involved do not always match up with when the websites are
periodically crawled and the content archived, leading to a potential failure
in capturing and preserving all of the relevant information (Kasioumis et al., 2013). Even for material
archived as recently as 2007, 50% of the pages archived by the British Library
were no longer leading to the expected page within seven years (Webber, n.d.).
As it relies on immediate interpretation, fieldwork may not be as
subject to this problem as the historical research with which I am more
familiar, but if the material being used for research can be lost so quickly,
research relying on it may not prove as reliable itself. Any error or oversight
may completely undermine months of hard work. Storing online content is not
easy, and concerns surrounding privacy and copyright are also serious issues
which must be addressed, but web archiving may prove necessary when properly
conducting online fieldwork, if the researcher fears they may have missed
something in the content they are examining the first time around, or if the
results are intended to be verifiable.
Sources:
Kasioumis, N., Banos, V., & Kalb, H. (2013). Towards building a blog preservation platform. World Wide Web, 17(4), 799–825. http://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-013-0234-4
Webber, J. (n.d.). What is still on the web after 10 years of archiving? - UK Web Archive blog. Retrieved March 3, 2016, from http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/webarchive/2014/10/what-is-still-on-the-web-after-10-years-of-archiving-.html
The point you make about the fragile nature of online interaction is one that I'm dealing with as well as part of a secondary research project concerning the preservation and bibliographic description of MMORPGs.
ReplyDeleteI think the point you make about fieldwork having to occur, at least initially, in the moment is one that is very relevant for online work.
As much as we may want to preserve things to create stable sources of information, the fast pace of online environments, coupled with their time-sensitive nature and the potential copyright issues makes that a very difficult endeavour.
Perhaps lessons from fieldwork can apply to online research as well to help us capture information and interactions which cannot be formally pinned down and preserved in their entirety.
The proprietary nature of MMORPGs definitely adds a layer of difficulty!
DeleteI'm also curious about the hear-say that happens online surrounding (particularly scandalous) events. Although a person can delete a tweet or a video, there are residual conversations about the posts. In particular, I'm curious about how we can deal with major events online whose trace is only found in these residual conversations. I wish I could think of an example off the cuff. The time-sensitive nature almost takes this into the realm of "big" history, where we only have accounts from people who may or may not have witnessed the event.
Another concern related to MMOs in particular relates not just to its online nature, but to the fact that at its core, the content absolutely does need to be multiplayer. World of Warcraft is the one with which I'm most familiar, and even if the game can be played on private servers in the future, much of the actual experience will be lost. The unending stupidity of Barrens general chat, which marked one of the more memorable, if annoying, parts of that experience of playing that game is likely never going to be truly replicated for someone playing the game in the future.
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