Welcome to the home page of the Digital Ethnography Workgroup (DEW). DEW is a community of professors, graduate students, and undergraduate students in the department of Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego. We use the tools of ethnography, in conjunction with technology, to document cognition in real-world settings. This website serves as a common meeting place for developing thoughts, activities, ideas, resources, and projects related to DEW.

We maintain a threaded hypermail site on which we discuss issues of concern to digital ethnography.
To contribute, send mail to dew@hci.ucsd.edu. To read the hypermail, visit http://hci.ucsd.edu/dew/hyper.

We also share a publicly editable WIKI website, on which we develop our procedures and shared expertise.

Why DEW?

Digital - because digital media provide exciting possibilities for creating, transforming and combining representations.

Ethnography - because the best way to find out how people make meaning is to go among them and carefully examine what they actually do.

Workgroup - because knowledge is the quintessential social product, and science requires co-labor-ation