Ethnography and artificial intelligence: the question of context

Abstract This article explores the ethnographic principle of contextualized meaning-making across traditional, digital, and artificial intelligence-based ethnographies. It approaches context from the perspective of language and social interaction, demonstrating how context is constituted through language and communicative practices in embodied, digital, and computational settings. The review addresses the challenges of defining context, emphasizing its dynamic nature. Moreover, the article advocates for a nuanced understanding of context and situated meaning-making to navigate the social, technical, and ethical complexities of machine-generated communication. Ethical considerations include the ongoing need for ethnographies that document the richness of situated human interactions in light of the automated extraction of linguistic and cultural capital, as well as the importance of participatory data stewardship.