Online Ethnography Studies in Computer Science: A Systematic Mapping

Abstract

During the last two decades, online environments became rich grounds for ethnographic studies. In the same period, online communities have become a popular and broadly studied research topic. Along with online environments, the growth of online communities brought by the Computer-Mediated Communications created a solid research field for online ethnography studies. Online ethnography methods, such as virtual ethnography and netnography, are widely adopted for qualitative research. However, it is not clear how Computer Science field is using online ethnography for empirical studies. Thus, the main goal of this study is to present how online ethnographic studies have been performed in Computer Science. To accomplish this goal, we carried out a systematic mapping study regarding empirical studies on online environments. Through the analysis of 36 resulted papers, this systematic mapping provides a broad overview of existing online ethnography studies in Computer Science and by identifying how these studies have been performed considering adopted methods, collected and analyzed data, community characteristics, and researcher participation throughout these empirical studies.