This blog will hold records of my ethnographic study of a household, or more specifically, a home library in a one-bedroom flat near King's Cross, London.

The research question for the home ethnography assignment was originally “how digital technologies help us understand the meaning of home”, and I think it would be interesting to focus on the home as a private library/study. With the digitization of books, movies, and music albums, I am curious about how people interact with digital media at home. If these forms of digital media are all “new media” and can be reproduced many times without degradation (Manovich, 2001)¹, then what do people do to make digital media bear their personal touch at home?

The form of digital media I want to focus on in is electronic books or documents on e-readers or in the computer. Apart from my personal interest in reading, I think e-books and documents are fascinating because unlike movies and music, it is easy to leave one’s personal touch in e-books and documents with functions such as annotations and highlights. Some people might not modify the files per se, but they might keep reading notes somewhere else if they are serious readers.

How people build and use their personal libraries at home also fascinates me. According to my preliminary findings before carrying out this research, most discussions on e-books are devoted to their different reading experiences from physical books and the positive and negative implications, the ways physical books can be digitized (and vice versa), how public libraries maintain their digital collections, and even whether public libraries are still relevant or not. Little has been discussed about how people incorporate digital books in their personal libraries and how physical books (if any) and digital books contribute to the idea of the private library/study.

Apart from the materiality of different reading formats, this blog will also address the following issues.

1. The ways in which digital technologies extended the private library to space outside of the home.
2. How memory was mediated by technologies.
3. Different methods of ethnographic data collection.
4. The choice of the platform to present the ethnographic materials.

Update: 2016/07/01

This blog was used solely for an assessed coursework that I did for my Msc study in Digital Anthropology, but I thought it would be a waste to stop updating it. Please click on Assessed Project for the original presentation of the project. I will keep writing about reading, materiality, and art here.