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Full Paper: Digital transformations are reshaping engineering practices with implications for conducting engineering education research. Given the paucity of discussion of digital methods within engineering education research, we believe it is important to examine and present to the community an overview of how digital technology is changing research practices. In this paper we focus on digital ethnography as it has implications for studies of technical education and work, which necessarily involve using, and observing how others employ digital data sources, tools, systems, methods, etc. In this paper we report preliminary results from an in-depth literature search and review. To select the papers for the review, we first examined prior meta-review papers that identified new ethnographic methods appropriate for digital contexts (e.g., network ethnography, trace ethnography, rapid ethnography, connective ethnography, focused ethnography, etc.). We then used these as keywords to search for papers that were representative of these methods and selected the 100 most cited papers from this corpus, with further screening resulting in a final collection of 91 papers. We then conducted free/open coding of the articles followed by thematic coding to identify six categories and dived deeper into one of the categories, focused on different approaches to ethnography, to further explore the various types of ethnographic methods mentioned in the collected literature. We close by discussing how emerging techniques in ethnographic field research can be applied to engineering education research with engineering work practices as an exemplar. 

There remains a lack of research on professional engineering work practices [1]. This deficiency is troubling because engineering education is organized and reorganized based on claims and assumptions about what professional engineering work is or will be. Without well-researched and trustworthy representations of practice, it is questionable whether engineering educators can adequately prepare future engineers for workplace realities. Although it is important that the preparation of future engineers not be tied solely to the workforce, there is a significant “disconnect between engineers in practice and engineers in academe” [2, p. 18]. If educators want to prepare students for professional success – including by assuming roles as future leaders and change agents – concrete images of engineering work are critical resources for rethinking engineering education [1]. The need for such resources is even more urgent given ongoing changes to engineering work under the forces of globalization, new organizational configurations, and new technologies of communication, design, and production. More research is needed to document images that are often discounted by students and even faculty, i.e., portrayals of engineering practice that emphasize its non-technical and non-calculative sides, as well as its non-individual aspects [3-4]. The aim of this work-in-progress paper is to introduce an exploratory project that will test innovative approaches to data collection and analysis for rapidly generating new knowledge about engineering practice. Traditionally, engineering practices have primarily been studied using in-depth ethnographic field research, requiring researchers to embed themselves as participant observers in the workplace. Yet technical work increasingly involves open workspaces and geographically distributed teams, frequent changes in job roles and team composition, and many layers of digital abstraction and collaboration. It thus may not be feasible or optimal to perform on-site research for extended periods of time. The main aim of this paper is to introduce method innovations for conducting field research which can potentially generate higher quality data more efficiently. Before doing so, we briefly overview prior research on engineering practice.