Digital Fieldwork

Posted on October 22, 2011 by spagnoloacht

I am interested in exploring emerging notions of “digital fieldwork” that integrate various aspects, including: doing research online (the web as the “field” and online contributors as “informants”), examining the status of primary sources online, organizing one’s data (see other session proposal on database setup), integrating digital and analog primary sources, blurring the lines between participant-observer fieldworkers and informants, and especially using social media and other platforms to conduct collaborative research. My interest is twofold: on the one hand, I’d like to hear what others are doing, their challenges and success stories; on the other, I’m very interest in the theory of fieldwork, and in how digital technologies are impacting it. I’d like for this conversation to be as interdisciplinary as possible.

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About spagnoloacht

Curator of The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life and a lecturer in the Music Department at UC Berkeley. I am a multidisciplinary scholar focusing on Jewish studies, music and digital media. Intersecting textual, visual and musical cultures, I contribute to academic, cultural heritage and archival institutions, and live and electronic media in the United States, Europe and Israel. I have a Doctorate in Philosophy (Milan 1994) and a PhD in Musicology (Jerusalem 2007), and I'm a former host of Italian National Radio' cultural programs. At The Magnes, I created an online integrated (Archive-Library-Museum) database, and several innovative digital programs, including "Jewish Digital Narratives," a project involving the online dissemination of cultural heritage collections, storytelling and archiving that combines website and database approaches with social media tools. More at http://profiles.google.com/spagnoloacht/about