Ethnography and Machine Learning: Synergies and New Directions
It addresses the separation of qualitative and computational methods in social science, offering a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration, though it is incremental in proposing integration rather than a new breakthrough.
This paper explores the integration of ethnography and machine learning for large comparative studies, highlighting their synergistic value and providing examples from projects to illustrate workflows and a roadmap for coevolution.
Ethnography (social scientific methods that illuminate how people understand, navigate and shape the real world contexts in which they live their lives) and machine learning (computational techniques that use big data and statistical learning models to perform quantifiable tasks) are each core to contemporary social science. Yet these tools have remained largely separate in practice. This chapter draws on a growing body of scholarship that argues that ethnography and machine learning can be usefully combined, particularly for large comparative studies. Specifically, this paper (a) explains the value (and challenges) of using machine learning alongside qualitative field research for certain types of projects, (b) discusses recent methodological trends to this effect, (c) provides examples that illustrate workflow drawn from several large projects, and (d) concludes with a roadmap for enabling productive coevolution of field methods and machine learning.