From the earliest stages of the pandemic, the mediatisation of performing arts have become visible to a broad and non-specialist audience. During this time, the internet and social media became the only interface between the theatre sector and its audience for many months. Digital performance leapt from niche artistic consumption to the mainstream during that moment. Art residencies are also among the practices affected by that migration. Some initiatives tried to rethink the residency idea beyond the physical space. Digital residencies have therefore represented a threefold state of liminality: the work in progress status inherent to residency, the suspended time of the pandemic, and the (for many) exceptional space of digital performance.

Even though the restrictions on attending theatre are gone, some of these experiences have continued. Our study asks what happens to digital residencies beyond the “temporary disruption” of the pandemic? How do theatre artists and audiences address the exceptionality of digital residencies during and after the pandemic?

To answer these questions, we analysed the Italian case of Residenze Digitali. The project was born in 2020 with the intent to stimulate performing artists to explore the digital space as a further declination of their research. Our research compares two years: 2021, when some restrictions were still in place, and 2022 when these restrictions were lifted entirely. Through 42 in-depth interviews conducted with spectators, artists and organisers, we will explore the different meanings associated with the digital threshold for theatre at the two different times.

Standardized manual content analysis is an important methodology to capture the messages in journalistic and social media. Specifically, for supervised machine learning aproaches, human-generated training data is needed. The process of coding as well as the selection of suitable coders is crucial for obtaining good data quality. However, little research has been done on how the coding process should be designed and how personal characteristics of the coders might influence data quality. This blind spot becomes even more crucial because coding is nowadays increasingly performed with the help of crowdworkers. When working with such anonymous coders, the process of coding can then be less controlled by the researchers, which can lead to loss of quality.

In our comparative mixed-methods study we compare data from a content analysis on the topic of legalizing abortion (n = 300 tweets). We conducted this in two ways: Firstly, with a team of four student coders who also received training and secondly with 150 crowdworkers. All coders had to complete a short survey on their socio-demographics and personality traits.

The results show that both validity and reliability are higher for the student coders, especially for tricky coding tasks. Further, multivariate (logistic) regression analysis reveals that personal characteristics such as formal education and emotional sensitivity also have an impact on coding quality. Hence, with a reflective selection of coders as well as a thoughtful design of the coding process and the codebook, the quality of data collection can be increased—even when relying on crowdworkers.

In a cultural context where high school-aged youth spend almost as much of their time online as they do sleeping – or participating in any other daily activity – debates have emerged regarding the effects of cellphone and social media use on the well-being of young people today. COVID-19 further transformed cellphones and social media into a few of the only tools with which some youth can stay socially connected and fueled contemporary moral panics surrounding young people’s online engagement. These considerations should be taken seriously in research, where the roles of cellphones and social media are carefully thought of in parallel to ethical social inquiry design with youth. Accordingly, this paper provides a reflexive review of my experience interviewing 30 Ontario-based, high school-aged youth with Jørgensen’s (2016) “media-infused” interview method, the media go-along, where interviewees respond to thematized questions while they scroll through, interact with, and talk about an app on their cellphone. By applying youth studies and critical Internet studies to my one-on-one interviews, I discuss my preliminary insights on in-progress research to consider how the participant-led media go-along resists positivist understandings of data and empowers young research participants, thereby challenging long-lasting understandings of youth as vulnerable and “at-risk.” I ask: What insights can the media go-along provide interviewers as a method that challenges the online/offline binary of data collection? As a participatory and collaborative method that critically integrates both participants and digital technologies, how is the media go-along revolutionary to youth, feminist, and Internet research projects alike?

The rise of the Internet brought about a revolution in the ethnographic method, one which decades later remains ongoing and lively as ever. In this paper, I offer a detailed description of the creative, multi-modal, multi-sited ethnographic practice I employed in my dissertation research on the slow fashion movement. To do this, I outline the three key ethnographic practices I employed across the digital and in-person spheres of my research: (1) scrolling, (2) shopping, and (3) sewing. My method builds on one of digital anthropology’s most recent and exciting methodological transformations: ‘immersive cohabitation’ (Bluteau 2021). Further, my discussion examines the methodological tensions the use of the internet brought up during my fieldwork through the exploration of three questions: (1) What happens when your fieldsite is algorithmically designed to addict you? (2) What happens when your fieldsite encourages overconsumption? (3) What happens when your ethnographic practice becomes a performance? In pursuing answers to these questions, this piece offers a critical reflection on the possibilities and the complexities facing internet ethnographers in the present moment.