Trace Ethnography: Following Coordination through Documentary Practices

Abstract

We detail the methodology of 'trace ethnography', which combines the richness of participant- observation with the wealth of data in logs so as to reconstruct patterns and practices of users in distributed sociotechnical systems. Trace ethnography is a flexible, powerful technique that is able to capture many distributed phenomena that are otherwise difficult to study. Our approach integrates and extends a number of longstanding techniques across the social and computational sciences, and can be combined with other methods to provide rich descriptions of collaboration and organization.