Doing old-fashioned (field)work in new social spaces
Ida Tolgensbakk:, Norwegian Museum of Cultural History

This talk is a collaboration between Humlab and ethnology (the department of culture and media studies).

This talk will discuss the advantages of taking old wisdoms with us when doing fieldwork online. In ethnology, folklore and related fields, we have long and established modes of handling "the field". We have scholarly traditions of doing qualitative interviews, of participant observation, "being there" and taking notes in all kinds of contexts where people live their lives. With social platforms online having become ingrained in everyday life, we as researchers have moved where our informants have taken us: to chatrooms and forums, comment sections and social media. We are inventing new ways of doing our work as we go: the affordances of the media do for instance make it easier to add quant to our qual. However, I argue that much of our old truths of fieldwork still stands in the new online surroundings.

Tolgensbakk, Ida holds a PhD in cultural history and is senior curator at the Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. She has a particular interest in Nordic migration history, but has written on such diverse topics as digital activism, internet memes as genre, and kebab. Orcid: 0000-0002-9580-6992

This talk is part of the seminar series "What's left to discuss? Methodological approaches and qualitative methods in times of transformations".