Our intention is to share some of our experiences and methodologies as a research agency practicing applied digital ethnography in industry spaces. We aim to bring the perspective of our agency to AoIR 2024’s theme of industry so that we can share, engage, and facilitate discussions with scholars interested in applications of digital ethnography outside academia.

We will explore the challenges of introducing ethnography into industry spaces and discuss our approaches. These include strategic data storytelling to confront bias and stigma from industry leadership, triangulation of data through multiple methodologies and sources to combat skepticism around qualitative data, using ethnographic analysis as an engine for synthesizing data across different models, maintaining the fast-paced operational speed required in the industry, and working within the tension between leadership and their publics.

Our insights are primarily based on our own research experience. However, we also connect our experiences and methodologies with scholarly theory on ethnographic definitions/key concepts, informal discussion ethnography, ethics in digital ethnography, and triangulation of varied sources and perspectives in ethnography.

We have been conducting digital ethnography for almost two decades. We draw from this extensive body of work, including perspectives on how online behavior and platform changes have influenced our research methods.

We not only bring scholarly ethnographic theory into industrial arenas but also have extensive experience operationalizing these theories in live settings due to the fast pace at which we complete projects for clients.

Our work continues with a diverse client base across government, healthcare, education sectors among others.

Veganism has become an increasingly trendy, profitable, and marketable lifestyle, particularly in western democracies. As a result of this popularisation a range of mobile apps have emerged as technical intermediaries for vegan consumption, including food delivery apps, nutrition trackers, restaurant locators and barcode scanners. As tools, vegan apps provide instant and tailored online content for users, encouraging consumers to shop vegan and sustain a plant-based lifestyle. Yet questions remain around the ethical status of the vegan apps and their potential as tools for sustainable consumerism. This project investigates how mobile apps shape the construction, practice and mobilisation of vegan consumerism, drawing upon key debates relating to ethical consumption technologies and vegan politics. This is achieved using the approach of digital ethnography, with two parallel phases, including the walkthrough method and participant observations. Moreover, a case study approach is employed, looking at two popular vegan apps within the Australian mobile market: HappyCow and Fussy Vegan Pro. The findings from this project contribute to a growing area of literature interested in the intersection between veganism and technology, with an original focus on vegan consumption technologies.

Drawing on iterative, empirical work that investigates the conditions of an everyday hypermediated environment, this paper focuses on experiences of livestreaming from the Disney Parks in order to think about the embodied and the technological in relation to the limits of mobility within this configuration of space(s). Central to the issues I am taking up here is an idea of space which is doubly lived: first, as a physical, tangible space (in thinking about live streamers in the Disney Parks), and second, as a virtual space (such as Internet streaming sites such as YouTube, for example). As such, I am arguing that we can think about these spaces as a vicarious space in which vicarity is underpinned by a sense of mobility and an investment in the embodied. Vicarious space is implicitly configured through the technological in relation to video-sharing platforms and within social, cultural, political, and economic structures and systems which are – ultimately – everyday and mundane. These ideas come to be framed by an overwhelming sense of industry that is threaded through enmeshed within neo-liberal political structures. Yet industry is not often seen here, and instead, these practices and experiences relating to live streaming are understood as centrally relating to pleasure and affect. What I am asking here then is how is vicarity imagined in terms of embodied subjectivity and agency? And how should we understand this in terms of the Internet and opportunities for connectivity?

Accuracy and precision are among the central values in the ML communities and tech industry. What does it take to achieve a high level of technical accuracy? What are the harms resulting from technology companies' obsession with technical accuracy and precision, and who incurs the greatest burdens? This paper explores accuracy in the context of AI training in China. Drawing on 9-month multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, we document workers’ everyday working practices and challenges and harms under the guise of achieving extreme levels of technical precision demanded by the clients and ML practitioners. We introduce the notion of precision labor, referring to the hidden work involved in erasing the messy, ambiguous, and uncertain aspects of technology production, all in the pursuit of presenting technology as objective, truthful, and high-quality. This notion provides a lens to understand the disproportionate impact of unnecessary and unrecognized labor on digital labor communities within AI production and the emerging harms on them, such as financial precarity and machine subordination. It joins existing work on the prevailing values in ML communities, questions the legitimacy and sustainability of the pursuit of performative accuracy, and calls for enhanced reflexivity and timely intervention.