Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices

We detail the methodology of ‘trace ethnography’, which combines the richness of participant-observation with the wealth of data in logs so as to reconstruct patterns and practices of users in distributed sociotechnical systems. Trace ethnography is a flexible, powerful technique that is able to capture many distributed phenomena that are otherwise difficult to study. Our approach integrates and extends a number of longstanding techniques across the social and computational sciences, and can be combined with other methods to provide rich descriptions of collaboration and organization.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: HICSS
• Authors: R. Stuart Geiger, David Ribes
• Keywords: Biometrics, HICSS 2011, Longstanding Techniques, Powerful Technique, ‘trace Ethnography