Virtual Ethnography

Christine Hine is a reader in sociology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Her main research centres on the sociology of science and technology with a particular interest in the role played by new technologies in the knowledge production process. She also has a major interest in the development of ethnography in technical settings, and in “virtual methods” (the use of the Internet for social research). In particular, she has developed mobile and connective approaches to ethnography which combine online and offline social contexts. She is the author of Virtual Ethnography (SAGE Publications, 2000), Systematics as Cyberscience (MIT, 2008), Understanding Qualitative Research: The Internet (Oxford, 2012), and Ethnography for the Internet (Bloomsbury, 2015) and the editor of Virtual Methods (Berg, 2005), New Infrastructures for Knowledge Production (Information Science Publishing, 2006), and Virtual Research Methods (SAGE Publications, 2012).