Ethnography beyond thick data

This article presents opportunities for enriching anthro-pological knowledge and methods with machine learningand data analysis. Different examples show how quan-titative methods empower anthropologists and howcomputational methods supplement ethnography, fromsensor data and interview transcripts to designing tech-nology solutions and automatically labeling culturalheritage. Conversely, the authors discuss the benefits ofqualitative approaches in contemporary anthropologicalresearch and show how to transition from data analysisto ethnography and vice versa. Finally, the article pin-points aspects in which each method can fail individually.It discusses why a combination of the two approaches,called circular mixed methods, minimizes the chance offailure and maximizes insights from the data.