Crafting ethnographic experiences : ways of knowing Facebook influences of a practice-based approach on research on everyday digital life

This paper presents reflections on ethnographic research, which was undertaken in 2010 exploring the link between Facebook and the use of it by undergraduate students studying in Higher Education at one UK university. The focus of this paper is interrogating the use of practice-based methods within an ethnographic methodology. I present reflections on using design thinking, craft skills and card modeling to supported analyses of participants social interactions on the social media site, Facebook, in coming to know the digital space. Jungnickel and Hjorth (2014, 136) propose that ethnography and practice-based art research have a long ‘tacit history’ and that ‘the process of making and thinking through art is an integral part of doing research’. Using the data collected during the ethnography from my time spent in the field. I take a reflexive view of my translation of the data into material form and discuss the analytical process I went through in coming to know Facebook as ‘narrative interpretation’ and ‘thinking with my hands’.