How do village residents use (online) spaces to communicate and build a sense of neighbourhood?
Histon and Impington is a small village on the outskirts of Cambridge. Previously two separate villages, the two parishes joined together in 1806. The current population is 12,091.
This website is part of my MSc Digital Anthropology UCL. I conducted an online ethnography into Histon and Impington to conceptualise the notion of 'neighbourhood'. I am interested in how online and offline spaces intertwine to create one cohesive neighbourhood.
About the site
This website is designed to be a communicative and immersive medium. My research is concerned with how online and offline spaces facilitate communication and build up a sense of neighbourhood. I found residents use online spaces and digital mediums to preserve their history, build a sense of collective identity and imagine their futures. This website reflects my research interests by providing another mode of representation for village residents.
When starting research, I was unaware of the myriad ways residents were already re-constructing and re-imaging their neighbourhood through diverse mediums. By combining a range of visually creative perspectives, this website explores the concept of psychogeography: the psychological experience that connects people to their environment by illuminating forgotten aspects (Lyons 2017).
This website sits alongside already existing representations of the village and provides an immersive experience that draws attention to the relationship between humans and digital technologies. The site includes an interactive map which is the result of a collaboration between myself and my interlocutors and provides another layer of meaning to the diverse spaces residents are already cultivating.
Aims
By providing an immersive experience, this project aims to explore space visually through multiple mediums whilst re-enchanting the village by intermeshing online and offline realms in a visually creative way. In doing so, the project aims to illustrate how digital spaces are equally as multi-faceted as face-to-face spaces.
The map aims to intermesh online and offline spaces into one coherent digital space, and demonstrate the affordances of digital anthropology for understanding people's experiences living in their neighbourhood.
I think my interlocutors were already immersed in this process before I arrived, and in a way, they are performing their own long-term ethnography by recording their own lives. I hope that through these visual representations, residents can learn more about digital technologies, digital anthropology and ethnography.
My Research
My research considers the importance of locally situated knowledge by collaborating with residents from Histon and Impington. Instead of simply conducting participant observation and interviews, I invited my interlocutors to contribute towards the presentation of my research findings. In doing so, this project foregrounds lived experiences, personal perspectives and human potentialities. By attending to a particular collection of people and combining their perspectives, experiences and creative contributions, this site provides a shared space which promotes the very notion of neighbourhood through a celebration of people’s achievements. As one of my interlocutors so rightfully phrased it, this is “independence supporting independence”.
Interactive Map of Histon and Impington
Please click on the interactive map and browse at your leisure. The integration of online spaces into the physical neighbourhood visually articulates the notion that digital spaces are interwoven with social life.
Click on each icon to find out more about the area. You can use the arrows to look through the photos and scroll down to read more text. Some icons are accompanied by videos or sounds, so listen out!
The map was illustrated by Sue Smith. You can see more of her work here - https://www.suesmithart.com/
Methodology
Due to restrictions on face-to-face research, this project was conducted entirely online. I conducted a digital ethnography, an emerging style of online ethnography grounded in digital methods that considers the “nature and affordances” of digital environments by following flows of information and social activity (Caliandro 2014: 15). My research began on 'HI People', the village's largest online platform, and then expanded to other online and offline spaces.
As social relations and movements are interconnected, studying social lives benefits from multi-modal designs (Postill and Pink 2012). This digital ethnography was blended (combining online and offline approaches) and networked (tracing the flow of activities) (Hine 2015). I observed the networked nature of human and non-human actors and the way imagined collectives emerge through the intersection of people and technology (Boyd 2011).
Digital anthropology is well-positioned to study the intersection of online and offline neighbourhoods, as it enables long-term engagement in social networks and relations. Online spaces articulate the networked nature of social relations and are “instrumental for constructing more spatially complex ethnographic field-sites” (Hine 2015: 2). Conducting research digitally allowed me to contact people easily and gather a repository of visual material. Social media can facilitate collaborative research and contextualise other data (Barker 2013). Many of my field notes, such as text and videos 'wrote themselves' (Nardi 2016).
However, my research suffered from a lack of social connection. Similarly to the issues described by my participants, online platforms do not afford the same intimacy as face-to-face. Further, “online ethnography creates the need to discuss the ethical problem afresh” (Hine 2015: 5). I felt distanced from my participants and it felt ethically wrong taking screenshots even though I blurred names and photos. I embedded social media activity in real-life contexts (Trere 2012) to “reflect the complexity of lived experience” (Hine 2015: date) and to reject digital dualism, the idea that online and offline spaces are distinct categories.
Site Analysis
Whilst HI People was useful for gathering an overview of the village and flows of information between online and offline spaces, the group also became useful as a place to recruit participants, keep in contact with participants and stay up to date with village life.
Participant observation
Participant observation proved difficult in HI People and other online spaces. Whilst conducting research during a pandemic provided fruitful insights, limited access to offline activities due to covid restrictions meant I relied on other data collection methods.
Zoom Interviews + Photo elicitation
Interviews via Zoom were insightful and became the backbone of data collection. The virtual format did not hinder my ability to collect data, but it did affect the ease of rapport building.
I conducted photo-elicitation with one of my interlocutors. The method was useful for understanding more about why people post photos on Facebook.
Collaboration
Creative contributions from participants, such as illustrations; sound recordings; mine-craft; and the model railway provided insights into personal perspectives.
I believe that creative, collaborative endeavours should be more widely used in academia, as they convey complex information in accessible ways.
Illustrations
Illustrations contextualise text, make findings accessible through creative immediacy and add another layer of visual analysis gathered from interdisciplinary fields. This makes findings easier to narrate, allows participants to share their stories and appeals to wider audiences beyond academia. This is important when returning research findings to communities and engaging in interdisciplinary conversations.
Laptop Ethnography
My laptop became a hybrid, multi sensory device from which I recruited participants, undertook site analysis, and conducted interviews.
Conducting research entirely through digital mediums felt isolating. Even though I was able to build rapport with my interlocutors, research processes felt distanced.
