Code Ethnography: A Practical Workshop for Internet Researchers
Code ethnography is a method for examining code as a socio-technical actor, considering its social, political, and economic implications within the context of digital infrastructures (Rosa, 2022). The method aims to take the role of code seriously, allowing us to enroll code ethnographically in our research by examining it as language and identifying its grammar.
Defining code in simple terms, “it is that which makes an application or routine work. Taken more broadly, it is a social, political, and economic agent and the result of all those spheres” (Rosa, 2022, p. 434). When discussing code, authors have shown instances of inclusion of some people and artifacts, while also exclusion of others (Couture, 2019). Authors have also shown that once programmed, code can discriminate, erase, and disregard certain existences, and certain ways of being and knowing (Benjamin, 2019; Costanza-Chock, 2020, Lewis, Jason Edward, ed., 2020, Buolamwini, 2023). To address these problems, code ethnography understands code as part of a chain of relations that allows it to be examined and situated in its own environment in tandem with people’s lived experiences (Rosa, 2022, 2023).
In this 2-hour workshop, the facilitators, Fernanda Rosa, an assistant professor of decolonial science and technology studies, and Melquiades (Kiado) Cruz, a Zapoteco scholar who works on internet governance and Indigenous rights, are going to guide the participants to experiment code ethnography, by applying the method to a code that participants select. No preparation or previous experience working with code is necessary. People with disability are also welcome to this activity.
The assumption of code ethnography is that infrastructure is the expression of the codes that it carries, as much as our bodies express the cultural codes we carry with us. Participants will experiment with a brief ethnographic investigation process applied to code and infrastructure, obtaining practical knowledge to replicate after the workshop. They will document, analyze and generate tangible results based on their research experiments.
By the end of the workshop, participants are expected to notice the benefits of integrating nonhuman actors in ethnographic methods as well as to include lived experiences in the analysis of code. Through practical exercises and multisensorial experiences, participants will have a better understanding of the role of the code ethnographer, and how to examine code as language to shed light on its values and the power relationships that it embeds.