Angela K. VandenBroek, PhD Anthropologist of Innovation (and all the hype that entails)

This episode presents a recording of CASPR 2022, or the CASTAC in the Spring 2022 mentoring event, which took place on May 10, 2022. CASPRT 2022 was organized to encourage dialogue on breaking down binaries that have separated academe and industry. Angela VandenBroek (TXTS), Melissa Cefkin (Waymo), and Dawn Nafus (Intel) discuss their work in leading socially-informed research in industry contexts.

Kits is a set of practical kits that explore innovative approaches to field research, analysis, and public anthropology from anthropologists with deep experience researching digital culture and technologies. New technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics are changing how we work, live, and socialize. The seamless and ever-present role of technology in the daily lives of people all over the world makes it impossible to study human culture and sociality without considering digitally mediated practices—including the practices and labor that generate new digital technologies and anthropology’s own engagements with them.

In navigating my ethnographic fieldwork among tech entrepreneurs, establishing sustained connections proved challenging due to the dynamic and fragmented nature of the industry. Rather than focusing on single entities within this volatile landscape, I adopted a multisited approach spanning various nodes like university innovation hubs, venture capital firms, and coworking spaces. This method, akin to "scavenging" as described by Nick Seaver, involved piecing together insights across diverse settings and networks. Drawing inspiration from participatory research methodologies, I developed Ethno.Space, a bespoke qualitative analysis tool tailored for collaborative use. This platform, initially intended as a data repository, evolved into a participatory framework where stakeholders engaged directly with data analysis. This approach, termed participatory analysis, aimed to democratize the research process by granting participants access to interpret and contribute insights. The methodology not only reshaped data analysis dynamics but also prompted reflections on ethical considerations and participant engagement strategies. The resulting "Participatory Analysis Kit" encapsulates guidelines for integrating such methodologies into research projects, emphasizing tailored software selection, data management strategies, and ethical safeguards. This kit supports researchers in navigating the complexities of collaborative ethnography within fluid sociocultural contexts, ensuring meaningful and ethical engagement throughout the research process.

As a first-generation scholar, my ambitions have always necessitated a patchwork career in parallel to my anthropological education. From customer service through to web development, these professional experiences have been shaped by my growth as an anthropologist and vice versa. This chapter is a reflection, inspired by teaching applied anthropology students, that explores what I learned tacking between theoretical anthropology and applied anthropology and how this tacking became an intertwining praxis at the intersection of design, technology, and anthropology. First, I argue that anthropology is not a career path that can only lead down one of two divergent roads: “academic” or “applied.” Rather, it is a way of thinking; it is a critical and ethical commitment; it is an ability to sit comfortably with intolerable complexity of social life and make sense of it;; and it is a curiosity and engagement with anthropological conversations. Second, I outline a series of tactics for building a more productive and impactful anthropological praxis from this perspective. I contextualize these tactics as not merely ways to “get things done” but also as a way of testing, extending, and expanding anthropological understandings of design so that we may also “do some good.”

In this article, we highlight a partnership between CommuniVax and a human-centered design firm (Bridgeable) that resulted in CommuniVaxCHAT—an online toolkit capable of engaging community members and translating their experiences and local knowledge in a way that decision-makers, including mayors and public health directors, can act upon. In addition to considering the process involved in creating CommuniVaxCHAT, and its associate practicalities, we examine how human-centered design, and more particularly personas and journeys, can act as boundary objects to facilitate engagement between groups and create interventions or policy. In this way, we argue that HCD can be used similarly to PhotoVoice as a tool to introduce ethnographic insights into applied and participatory contexts.

Penciling, a technique used to anonymize images for both human and machine vision, offers an opportunity to reduce technical traceability and retain visual data for online and social media research contexts. Drawing on methods for creating composite narrative and visual accounts to preserve participant anonymity, penciling enables researchers to edit images across a spectrum from photo-like quality to pencil sketch dependent on their ethical and methodological needs. Further, penciling reduces recognition to the naked eye and renders the image completely unrecognizable to search engine queries. We describe tested procedures for employing penciling and address benefits and challenges of the technique.

This study examines strategies for anonymizing online data in a way that follows ethical guidelines while also retaining the fluid nature of participant engagement with social media. We explore unanticipated ethical issues that emerged as we began capturing and anonymizing social media posts for our ethnography of college students and online sociality. Using examples from our data, we illustrate our penciling technique to anonymize images for the naked eye while also considering the digital footprint. We consider methodological and ethical challenges of anonymization in a specific internet research context — user generated social media images obtained with informed consent — and explore the implications of our findings on the potential life of digital content.