Appendix II: Project Descriptions

Abstract

In this appendix, we provide an overview of the research sites included in the Digital Youth Project. We have organized the sites into four general categories: homes and neighborhoods, institutional spaces, networked sites, and interest groups. While the categories are primarily organizational, they do help to emphasize the range of sites of inquiry that we draw upon for the analysis here—twenty distinctive research projects in total 1 —as well as the epistemology that shaped the ways we approached our effort to understand youth's engagement with new media from an ethnographic perspective. As is evident in our descriptions, many projects moved among different categories of research sites. For example, Lisa Tripp and Becky Herr-Stephenson's study of Los Angeles middle schools and Katynka Martinez's study of Pico Union families followed students at school and within their homes and neighborhoods. The points of intersection and divergence between the kids in the different studies were of great interest, such as when a researcher in the neighborhood cluster of studies discovered an anime fan, or conversely, when interest-based new media hobbies were notably absent among kids in a particular study. In this book, we describe practices that we observed in multiple case studies that emerged through collaborative analysis, and the specificities of the research sites and projects have largely been erased. In this appendix, we introduce the individual projects to provide the reader with some of the context that readers may feel is missing in previous chapters. Each study comprises an ethnographic analysis of new media in the lives of a particular population; taken as a whole, they offer a broader ecological perspective of how new media practices are distributed among diverse youth in diverse contexts.