This paper focusses on how the postal administrations and their international organisations responded to the digitisation of communication and to electronic mail services in particular. In the 1980s, on the one hand digital data processing became part of the letter mail infrastructures in the form of automatic letter sorting systems and on the other hand electronic mail services evolved as a potential future competitor. The paper shifts emphasis from the computer and telecommunications sector to the monopolists for physical mail (letter mail). In doing so, it will show that the digitisation of communication is not only a process of permanent technological progress, but also of alignment, examination and competition by and between different forms of communication such as physical mail. The physical postal services are an interesting example of a traditional form of communication which has had to find its way into the digital era.

This paper discusses the use of (online) theatre as an ethnographic research tool in an existing collaborative study on (digital) media use and social transformation in a Moroccan village situated in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. Due to the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic to the ongoing fieldwork there, the project team sought a way to re-establish a regular feedback loop with the village community in a non-physical way. As a solution, the project team, together with the local partners, decided to bring in a theatre maker to conduct online theatre workshops, with the aim to bring the project back to life in a meaningful way and to generate data for the overall goal of the project: to explore and develop socio-technical collabora- tion infrastructures in Morocco. This working paper describes the process, motivations, design, and outcomes of the project, as well as the controversies, opportunities, and struggles that arose during the theatre work. It also reflects on the added value and objections of such a collaboration between an academic and an artistic discipline and describes the process of ‘negotiating con- nection’ between researchers and research partners amidst the pandemic. I argue that, despite the necessary challenges, using theatre as a methodological tool for ethnographic research, can, through cooperation, allow researchers to better understand cultural practices, social relations, and power dynamics within a marginalized community.

The modern Swiss Confederation was founded in 1848. Since then, government and administration have been constantly reorganised. One important, but little noticed change occurred between the 1960s and 1980s: the automation and standardisation of information management. This was an important requirement for taking “binding decisions” (Niklas Luhmann) in times of rapidly growing quantities of information. The paper examines the steps toward automation in the Swiss federal administration using the example of the Zentrales Ausländerregister (Central Register of Foreigners; ZAR) of the Eidgenössische Fremdenpolizei (Swiss Police for Foreigners). Its focus is on the ZAR and data processing as a means of operationalising administrative workflows, showing that data processing developed incrementally on a path that finally led to the digitisation of increasingly large parts of the administration. A generalisation of this example yields a historical model of the early stages of digitisation of public administrations that would ultimately lead to various forms of e-government.

Book Review Symposium Charles Goodwin

This contribution carves out the co-operative foundations for ethnographic fieldwork, and participant observation in particular, by reflecting on the so-called ‘entry to the field’ as well as the establishment of rapport between ethnographer and interlocutors. Drawing on my fieldwork experience in the Moroccan High Atlas, I propose to understand the ethnographer’s delicate position as being both apprentice and expert simultaneously. Focusing on this relation enables methodological reflections on the workings of ethnographic research, the necessary co-operation of ‘researcher’ and ‘informants’, and the involved media practices. To take this tension seriously makes another insight possible: that the ethnographer, too, is being observed and under constant scrutiny. In this light, successful ethnographic research is possible precisely when successful conditions for mutual exchange and interaction can be situatively created and maintained. It is therefore a process of continuous co-operation that is mediated and necessarily involves media and even produces a range of different media practices.

Book Review Symposium Charles Goodwin

It is rare to find innovative, engaging, hierarchy-defying and, above all, precise descriptions of teaching exercises that are suitable for teaching complex theory and methodological approaches that are as multi-layered as post-digital ethnography. Those that exist are mostly scattered across a few non-specific blogs and private Twitter feeds – finding them is a matter of an obscure combination of serendipity and algorithms. In this working paper we reflect on our co-teaching methods applied in a Masterclass on post-digital ethnography. Our aim is twofold: not only to reflect on teaching methods in post-digital ethnography, but also to present concrete examples of implementation in teaching and co-teaching constellations by means of teaching exercises.

The text presented here was written by Harold Garfinkel for the Fourth World Congress of Sociology in Stresa (Italy) in 1959, where Garfinkel participated in the Section on the Sociology of Knowledge organized by Kurt Wolff. The "General Theme" of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology was "Society and Sociological Knowledge / La Société et la Connaissance Sociologique". Garfinkel's original Stresa paper had to be "heavily abridged" for publication (Garfinkel 1961).

This working paper presents the preliminary results of a masterclass in media ethnography that took place in April 2022 at the University of Siegen and was organised by SFB 1187 "Media of Cooperation". The central question was which research practices emerge when ethnographers understand the digital materiality of their research objects, instruments and environments as active participants within the research process. An approach to such a conscious correspondence (Weidle 2020) with digital materiality was initiated via the authoring software "Korsakow". What is special about Korsakow is the computer-generated multilinear linking of individual media assets it affords. By working with Korsakow, the participants of the masterclass explored and critically discussed possible new approaches to their research data, two of which are presented in this paper. For Astrid Vogelpohl, Korsakow represents a variant of combinatory visual research in which algorithms support the analysis process as non-human research partners. The extent to which the research paths differ from analytical work with primarily human partners is the focus of her elaboration. Tobias Leßner, on the other hand, first describes his personal approach to Korsakow and the accompanying irritations, questions and considerations against the background of his ethnographic work and then focuses on the pragmatic but also methodological implications of the shift of the ethnographer's authorship towards the algorithm and the power of interpretation towards the recipient. Ultimately, the approaches presented are starting points for further search movements for the digital and its (co-)operation in (media-)ethnographic research that reconfigures itself as diffractive in the context of the ontological turn (Mellander/Wiszmeg 2016). As part of the production of knowledge, this involves considering how the correspondence with digital materiality can be used to communicate research findings.

Frédéric Döhl analyses the development of the “Metall auf Metall” lawsuit from the beginning in 1999 until now and reviews all legal positions on micro-sampling. Moreover, he introduces “pastiche” as an exception in European copyright as a possible basis for the foundations of future copyright. So far, it remains to be clarified whether and how digital adaptations from other musical works and media can achieve the status of an “independent work” according to German copyright. Döhl reminds us that, in adaptation research, it is commonly acknowledged across all arts that, as a matter of principle, all adaptations can reach a state of artistic identity in their own right, no matter how prominent the original material may be in the new work. The controversial question is how and when these new works pass that threshold rather than whether they reach it at all. From an artistic point of view, the concept of independent use as an aesthetic category is a suitable instrument for a free balance of interests.