When doing classical fieldwork, ethnographers spend time in a foreign culture and try to describe this culture in a way that makes strange or unusual features understandable for their readers. It is a way to help addressees to see their own culture from a new perspective. The purpose of this chapter is to show how applied research can help to identify problems in society and professions and how it contributes to providing solutions by using the media linguistics toolbox. The chapter introduces some research frameworks, structures of various methods, and theoretical concepts. Furthermore, it aims to explain why the combination of linguistic and ethnographic frameworks is especially useful for finding out what people actually do when interacting in the context of digital media. The section on digital ethnography shows how doing research across offline and online spaces can broaden the understanding of the complexities of our contemporary world. Finally, the chapter introduces methods to generalize findings from ethnographic case studies systematically.

This chapter deals with the study of how deaf and hearing signers, and others, understand sign languages by themselves and in relationship to other languages and modalities. By doing linguistic ethnography, it is possible to investigate these language attitudes and ideologies as they unfold in everyday practice, towards ideas such as the status of sign languages and particular varieties; discourses surrounding linguistic authority, authenticity and ownership; and the emergence (or development) of new sign languages and new subject-specific vocabulary. The methods discussed in this chapter are ethnographic research methods and visual methods: participant observation, ethnographic filmmaking, and language portraits. The main points of the chapter are illustrated by means of three case studies: (1) participant observation in multilingual tourist spaces in Bali, in which Indonesian Sign Language, International Sign, and American Sign Language are used; (2) ethnographic filmmaking within an international multi-sited research project focusing on International Sign; and (3) the use of language portraits with new signers and heritage signers in Flanders, who mostly use Flemish Sign Language and Dutch.

This chapter situates the research in a mixed method framework with ethnography at the core. Ethnography emphasises that contexts for communication should be investigated rather than assumed and that the detailed analysis of linguistic data is essential to understanding its significance. It has been claimed that this informal knowledge about what can be said to whom, and how, has been overlooked in political accounts of institutions because mainstream comparative research in this area tends to analyse formal rules. Some of the complexities of conducting linguistic ethnographic work in institutions are: gaining access to research sites; researching powerful, elite participants and the viability of using the the readily available Official Reports as data. The ethnographic approach including ethnographic interviews and observations in situ in different parliaments, is combined with applied Conversation Analysis (CA). Gaining the floor has been viewed by analysts as a competitive economy and this is particularly apt for the highly regulated debate floor where turns are sought for professional and political gain. I also explain how Critical Discourse Analysis is used to assist the identification of gendered discourses relating to gendered linguistic stereotypes.