New technologies have enabled innovations in the ways in which we create knowledge, access information, and engage with our heritage. These changes also affect the public, which is not just leaving digital traces, but increasingly playing a part in contributing to knowledge production. The OII is charting the ongoing digital transformations of the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities, and their implications.
The aim OxDEG is to provide a platform for cross-disciplinary collaboration among students and staff across the university with interests in digital ethnography and qualitative research practice in an online environment.
In October 2011, an unofficial interdisciplinary seminar group was started by Dr William Kelly of the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) and Dr Eric T. Meyer of the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) to provide a space for students and faculty to meet to discuss ethnographic practice in the digital realm. The positive response from students and faculty across the university led to students taking a leading role in 2013 with a small grant from the Economic and Social Research Council through Oxford’s Doctoral Training in Social Science program. This year, we will have a combination of invited speakers and seminars to engage with the latest questions and research methods in digital ethnography.
The overarching theme is digital ethnography, broadly conceived. The group aims to extend inter-disciplinary academic research and collaboration among scholars at Oxford University interested in understanding rich, qualitative approaches to researching behaviour online. It will encompass a variety of research interests within this field, including digital visual anthropology as well as a variety of qualitative, ethnographic methodologies appropriate to the study of the digital environment.
Find out more about the Cabinet Project.
This project builds on fieldwork at Camp Grounded’s digital detox, where people were fighting a sense of disenchantment in modern life. Focusing on the way devices are interwoven throughout our lives, it rethinks the role of technology in society.
This project will examine the role of digital media in improving social understanding, with a particular focus on how trust can develop in the shared understanding of history and climate change.
This project interrogates the impact of AI on cultural heritages and the presentation of these futures through public-facing exhibition spaces. It will interrogate the agency of AI within exhibit contexts, exploring its role in creativity.
31 March 2025
New research reveals that social connections, more so than political alignment, can promote engagement with user-driven corrections of misinformation on social media platforms like X.
12 March 2025
New analysis finds that the number of hours spent playing Nintendo games did not significantly affect adults’ mental well-being, life satisfaction, emotional state, or depressive symptoms.
21 January 2025
With the rapid adoption of AI by children and adolescents using digital devices to access the internet and social media, OII experts call for a clear framework for AI research considering the impact on young people and their mental health.
This research cluster brings together researchers whose work is aimed at understanding the impacts of digital technologies on scholarly and public engagement with knowledge, arts, culture and heritage. Our work has involved physicists, marine biologists, historians, theatre companies, film makers, scholarly archives, major libraries, museums, universities, crowdsourcing projects and the BBC in research projects at the forefront of understanding this shifting landscape.
Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow
Kathryn Eccles has research interests in the impact of new technologies on Humanities scholarship, and the re-organisation of cultural heritage and higher education in the digital world.
Professor of Education, the Internet and Society
Rebecca Eynon's research focuses on learning and the Internet, and the links between digital and social exclusion.
Senior Research Fellow
Ralph Schroeder has interests in shared virtual environments and the sociology of science and technology. His current research is related to digital media and populism, climate change online, AI and social theory, and the internet in China and India.
