Digitalizing everyday life in Denmark during the corona crisis: The construction of an ethnographic archive

This chapter describes methodological considerations that formed part of constructing an ethnographic archive during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak, subsequent societal lockdown, and partial re-opening. We detail a collaborative effort between senior researchers from two Danish universities and a group of full-time and part-time research assistants to collect ethnographic data about how people in Denmark experienced being under lockdown and having to digitally reorder their everyday lives. We conceptualized our interest as seeking to document ‘ontological disturbances’ (Whatmore 2009) and to grasp people's digital ‘modes of ordering’ (Law 1994) during the pandemic. In the actual event, our efforts were less focused on conceptual and analytical developments but more on making ethnographic data generation techniques work in a digital-collaborative space where the immediate objective was to build an archive of people's lockdown experiences. Confined to our homes, and connected only through digital platforms, research was a disembodied, yet collective, endeavour. In seeking to grasp how the pandemic had disturbed the everyday lives of the research participants as well as how they sought to restore everyday routines, the researchers’ own lived experience of the crisis played a role in establishing rapport. One mode of ordering that characterized our data collection practice was the use of ethnographic protocols. The protocols were used to keep analytical distance and to achieve uniformity across the material to ensure we and other researchers would be able to analyze emerging everyday practices of digitalization after the pandemic. Based on our research experiences of setting up the research project and one instance of seeking to use it, this chapter offers a couple of methodological lessons for future digital anthropologies.