32 GENIUS INTERVIEW Francesca Tripodi
red states go to the Republicans, and purple states are the swing states in between. Unfortunately, ethnography takes a really long time, and only having one year, I had to home in on one specific area. The state of Virginia was having a very high profile governor’s race, and Virginia is now considered a swing state, even though it was red for quite some time. So we decided to focus my research inside the state of Virginia. I was able to gain access to some really amazing people inside a women’s Republicans group and a college Republicans group who knew I was doing a research project and graciously allowed me to sit in on their monthly meetings and go with them to their events, in addition to allowing me to do observation at barbecues and fundraisers. I also went to the election night party and did in-depth
There are other researchers at Data & Society who are studying artificial intelligence or human rights or how technology affects the labour market. It’s a robust institution looking at a wide variety of issues concerning data. In the past year, under the very generous funding and overarching advice of Data & Society founder Danah Boyd, we crafted a research project on the connection between partisanship and how we access information. FEED: And this resulted in your report “Searching for Alternative Facts”. How did that come about? FT: We initially thought about how I could put myself in a few different states in the US – say, a blue state, a red state and a ‘purple’ state. In the US, blue states are those that tend to go to the Democrats,
interviews with people closely associated with them. I wanted to get at a central research question, which was : how do you go about looking for news and information that you trust? FT: I was inside Republican organisations, but most of the people I spoke to identified as ‘conservative’ rather than Republican. The groups I was embedded with were in different cities, but there were similar rituals in all of the groups. And there was the influence of a Christian world view which, I think, does affect critical interrogation of media. FEED: What kinds of sources did they use to get their news and information? FEED: And what did you find?
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