Sylabus:
1. Introduction to digital anthropology
2. Fields of study – social media, forums, Image boards,
3. Smart phones, digitalization of everyday life
4. Issues of digital environment – algorithms, biases, people left behind
5. Methods: qualitative
6. Methods: quantitative
7. Migration
8. Socio-politics
9. Folklore
10. Online games
11. Online subcultures
12. Future of digital world: VR, metaverse
In this course students will be introduced to the field of digital anthropology. Specifically, we will look at the fields in which digital anthropologists conduct their research, such as social media or online games.
Some of the issues connected to the digitalization of everyday life, biases and algorithms. Methods used by the researchers – both traditional and ones specific to the digital environment.
We will look at ways traditional anthropological topics can be viewed through digital lenses, such as migration and folklore. In the end, we will look at some of the purely online phenomena and ways they bleed into offline world.