Heather Horst | Platypus

Author Archives: Heather Horst

Heather A. Horst is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, Co-Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and a Research Fellow in the MA Program in Digital Anthropology at University College London. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, Heather’s research focuses upon new media, material culture, and transnational migration. She is the co-author of The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst and Miller, Berg, 2006), Living and Learning with Digital Media: Findings from the Digital Youth Project (Ito, Horst, et al., 2009, MIT Press), and Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with Digital Media (Ito, et al. 2010, MIT Press). Her most recent book, to be released in October 2012, is an edited volume with Daniel Miller entitled Digital Anthropology.

Digital Ethnography

 Heather Horst  April 16, 2013

At the end of 2012 Larissa Hjorth, Jo Tacchi and I published a special issue of Media International Australia on ‘rethinking’ ethnography and ethnographic practice (see TOC below). Through six single and co-authored contributions, the special issue considers the variety of ways in which the changes in our media environment broadens what we think of as ‘media’, the contexts through which media is produced, used and circulated and the emergent practices that digital media affords. We begin this inquiry by considering how the changing media environment has introduced new scholars and debates around the value and practice of ethnography. We then turn more specifically to the ways in which media ethnography is being practiced in light of the new contexts of research, be they the broadcasters trying to keep pace with the changes of the changing media environment or researchers working through what to do with the fieldsite and myriad of (read more...)