Ethnography and the augmented interview

The principal contention of this paper is that an ethnographic interview based on the mutual discussion of specific images or things can produce entirely different results from the more conventional interview based solely on language. The main example that will be presented comes from the ethnographic work that Craig Ryder conducted with political influencers in Sri Lanka. This example takes us to the vanguard of what is possible, because it involved data visualisations that included the interviewee's social media activities. This example is then generalised to other cases where the presence of visual and material forms within the interview contexts radically changes the results of those interviews, sometimes producing almost the opposite insights to conventional interviews based merely on questions and answers. The paper concludes by showing how augmentation makes three significant contributions: it grounds the interview, it displaces dominant discourses and it creates a more collaborative relationship between the interviewer and the interviewee.