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In practical terms, and connected to the concept of site, the fieldwork is also continuously questioned and designed throughout the study, rather than fixed a priori (Burrell, 2009), thus including every possible interaction, situation, form of communication that the observation returns. In other terms, as Candea (2007) recognises, it is the concept of site/field that has changed from being a tool to being an object of ethnography something that has its own reality and breath, where “the ethnographer is increasingly understood to be working‘in’ (and‘on’) the sites which are meaningful to the people he or she works with ” (Candea, 2007, p. It has to be laboriously constructed, prised apart from all the other possibilities for contextualisation to which its constituent relationships and connections could also be referred" (2000, p. “|I]n a world of infinite interconnections and overlapping contexts, the ethnographic field cannot simply exist, awaiting discovery. Sites become contingent, continuously shifting, mobile and inherently fluid.This is also observed by Amit among others, who says that: “is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography” (1995, p.
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In respect to traditional ethnography, usually bounded to a single site of research (a given community, a moment in time, a certain ritual etc.), multi-sited ethnography: Starting with the site, Marcus pinpointed a crucial difference with more traditional sociological inodes of research. In a nutshell, multi-sited ethnography has laid the foundations for a reconceptualization, in both theoretical and methodological praxis, of a) the site and fieldwork and b) the people, to which 1 now briefly turn. The word negotiation is key here, as it taps into broader conceptualisations of the flexibility and adaptability required to understand the fluidity of contemporary systems. This was recognised by Marcus in particular, who argued that multi-sited ethnography is “always constructed with a keen awareness of being within the landscape, and as the landscape changes across sites, the identity of the ethnographer requires negotiation" (Marcus, 1995, p. In recognising the tension between the global and the local and the changing nature of political, cultural, social and economic systems, digital humanities scholars and ethnographers have soon recognised the need to re-focus their objects of study, the ways to approach them, and the type of fieldwork they wanted to conduct in order to make sense of such heightened complexity. Similarly, and by encouraging openness, collaboration and experimentation across and within disciplines, the digital humanities field encourages us to think about how each mode of research can serve as an entry point to a better and more organic understanding of the relationship between technologies, people and environments as they unfold and evolve. Interdisciplinary at heart, the scope of multi-sited ethnography was to follow the people, the thing, the metaphor, the story, the biography, or the conflict (Marcus, 1995). Here, and to really capture the essence of what we now commonly refer to as globalisation, that is the interconnectedness of systems of production, flows of information (Castells, 1996) and global mobility (Appadurai, 1996), a new way of mapping the connections taking place on a global scale and faster pace was considered necessary. In this brief statement, Marcus identified some of the key changes contemporary societies were witnessing as they moved towards a new postmodern stage characterised by growing interactivity, liquidity, and fragmentation (Falzon, 2009 Massey, 2005). “moves out from single sites and local situations of conventional ethnographic research designs to examine the circulation of cultural meanings, objects and identities in diffuse time space” (Marcus, 1995, p. In Marcus' words, multi-sited ethnography: Moving away from the stable and monolithic interpretations of modernity brought by single-sited research, the process of'refunctioning ethnography’ was meant to grasp the more fragmented and dynamic aspects of globalisation. Originally framed in 1995 by anthropologist George Marcus, multi-sited ethnography represented an attempt to adapt science to the new systems and practices of contemporaneity.