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The limits of ethnography: combining social sciences for CSCW

Published: 22 October 1994 Publication History

Abstract

This paper addresses some of the divergences between social sciences, and proposes the development of hybrid forms of participation in CSCW. It offers a critique of the theoretical isolationism of some ethnomethodological ethnography. It reviews the prospects for interdisciplinary collaboration, and seeks to motivate it with some “core propositions” which expose the inescapable character of the problems (although not necessarily of the solutions) which are “owned” by different disciplines. It illustrates hybrid forms with discussion of some issues in two areas: the cognitive versus the ethnographic; it further describes the politics of participation.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      CSCW '94: Proceedings of the 1994 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
      October 1994
      464 pages
      ISBN:0897916891
      DOI:10.1145/192844
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Publication History

      Published: 22 October 1994

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      Author Tags

      1. CSCW
      2. cognitive science
      3. distributed cognition
      4. ethnography
      5. ethnomethodology
      6. interdisciplinary relations
      7. participative design

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      CSCW94
      CSCW94: Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 94
      October 22 - 26, 1994
      North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA

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      CSCW '94 Paper Acceptance Rate 42 of 200 submissions, 21%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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      • (2020)Methods and Aspects of Field ResearchDesign Ethnography10.1007/978-3-030-60396-0_5(31-76)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2020
      • (2019)The Effect of Scientific Collaboration on CSCW Research: A Scientometric Study2019 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD)10.1109/CSCWD.2019.8791855(129-134)Online publication date: May-2019
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