There is no better summation of the basis of my methodology than from the creator himself:

“Netnography is a specific approach to conducting ethnography on the internet. It is a qualitative, interpretive research methodology that adapts traditional ethnographic techniques to the study of social media. “…”Netnography adds specific practices that include locating communities and topics, narrowing data, handling large digital datasets, analyzing digitally contextualized data, and navigating difficult online ethical matters and research procedures. The nature of researcher immersion and ethnographic (or “netnographic”) participation is also treated rigorously within netnography. The new approach has gained wide acceptance within business research and is spreading to other fields.”

Robert Kozinets

We are living in complicated times. The credentials and abilities of our once trusted institutions have proven to be ill-equipped to handle the new way of doing things in our cybersphere.

I am a long standing netizen, graduating from chat boards and personal CSS pages to getting hooked on Cicada 3301, accidentally falling into RT influence and eventually realizing I needed to deprogram and take a step back to protect myself. The internet is my home and it is being used as a tool of oppression and control. It could just be an incredible library but instead it’s turned into bubbles of algorithmically created conflict crashing into each other in comment sections.

We are overloaded with more information on a daily basis than any other generation in history. Truly this is a unique time. What is not very special about our time are the same traps that people continually fall into.

As an artist, my methodologies of creation are fluid but always in the context of the greater whole. Words have tremendous power and while we have the incredible skill of literacy, if it is not honed or developed we are at risk of greater forces taking advantage of our gaps.

Comment sections and online spaces have become the new townhall, coffeeshop, barber shop. Millions of people able to communicate in real-time from anywhere. The amount of data generated per day would take decades to sift through. How do we weed through all the chaos and noise? How can we make any sense of what is happening?

My solution to this existential distress was to learn the method of data collection and manipulation to help garner a deeper analysis that I could personally verify. You can have a hunch about something all you want but until you have hard numbers and data to corroborate these things it’s hard to feel secure in your interpretations of large groups.

As things progress in tech ethical concerns will become more prevalent. Using these methods places me into a position where I could potentially violate private spaces. For myself, I believe if you put something into a public space it no longer belongs to you. Much like art. Once you release it into the world regardless of what you hoped for the public now owns your work and collectively have the right to criticize it. You released it.

In my artistic opinion the same is true for publicly provided data.

If I can take a photograph of a scene on the street I should also be able to capture live public data. If I can write a song or paint a picture in regards to a political situation using modern news sources, data collection too must be an acceptable means of expression and understanding. The internet is the new space for culture and the data we give for free is being mined and studied to sell back to us in various ways.

There will be bias in my opinion but my goal is to collect and present the data I find as cleanly as possible. I will predominantly be using NLP techniques of processing and visualization as well as using certain http methods. The tools used are evolving and will be explained with each project.

Methods will change but I vow to not violate the privacy or safety of fellow netizens.

Everything is a learning project.

I will adhere to Netnography practices.

I vow to tell the truth as I see it.

Click on anything you can.