Language-specific digital ethnographic report

Abstract

This document is meant to provide an overview of the research design and aims, including the theoretical and empirical landscape to which it will contribute to. It indicates the types of topics, data, and contexts that are currently being examined within the Work Package 3 (WP3) of the CIDAPE project. This report serves as an essential introduction for stakeholders, academics, and other actors and offers a foundational understanding of the qualitative side of WP3 for the consortium as we move forward. When analysing social media communication on climate change in English, Spanish, and German, we seek to bridge quantitative and qualitative approaches. In a joint effort that parts from our defined expertise and is based on our extensive research experience in these fields, the work carried out in the framework of this project unites quantitative, computational approaches and a qualitative, ethnographic dimension. This report focuses on the latter and follows the qualitative research principle of using a first-person perspective in her accounting of research practices. Through an interdisciplinary approach blending several research fields, our aim for the qualitative dimension of Work Package 3, is a better understanding of digital discursive dynamics mirroring broader societal notions. This can aid theorization in media anthropology, digital cultures, audience research, and sociology. Socio-cultural aspects of digital communication practices will be analysed, to help us put ordinary media use around climate change into context. WP3 will provide relevant ethnographic insights plausible of being exported and contrasted to various other social media and offline contexts and communities. These include users’ engagements and contextualization of hashtags, memes, and concepts such as eco-anxiety, utopian futures, or radical hope underlying posts and textual comments.