The many meanings of ethnography

Ethnography, Ethnography or Ethnography? What Happens When the Same Word Means Different Things to Different People? is the title of a new paper on ethnography by Sasanka Prabhala, Daria Loi and Subhashini Ganapathy of Intel.

This paper discusses how the notion and practice of ethnography differs for practitioners with different disciplinary backgrounds, especially in a context where ethnography exits academia to enter industry contexts. The paper is divided into four sections. The first provides background to specific experiences and briefly over-views existing literature. In the second part we compare our experiences through an industry case study. The third section proposes a taxonomy, suggesting a number of implications, and providing recommendations on how to integrate cross-disciplinary approaches to expand the scope of conducting user research. The final section wraps up our propositions and provides a number of recommendations.

(via Nicolas Nova)