Collecting Rich Data from Afar: Opportunities and Challenges of Integrating the Digital into Ethnographic Methods

As researchers, there are times where we do not have the capacity to travel to the field, even though we are engaged in research that is geographically far away from us. Embracing the digital, both as a tool and as a space, is a viable avenue to continue ethnographic fieldwork under such circumstances. In this paper, we discuss the opportunities and challenges that conducting ethnographic fieldwork online offer, both through discussing existing research and by drawing from our own experiences of doing fieldwork from afar in Lebanon, Kosovo and Medellín (Colombia). The paper is divided along the lines of two crucial parts of ethnography: part one discusses participant observation and part two focuses on interviews. In part one, a distinction is made between ‘online participant observation’, which is a methodology developed within digital ethnographic methodology, and ‘participant observation online’, which is the use of traditional ethnographic methodology, but mediated through digital tools.