In 2022 I undertook a digital ethnography on cold water swimmers at Hampstead Ladies’ Pond as part of my MSc in Digital Anthropology. Our brief was to conduct a small-scale ethnography around the theme of London and the Senses - and what is more sensory than a winter plunge into the ponds?
The project is only viewable on mobile: my research showed that my participants’ interaction with the digital in relation to their cold water swimming practice was through their smartphones, so I followed suit with my fieldwork, data collection and presentation.
I engaged four participants who choose to swim in Kenwood Ladies' Pond on Hampstead Heath during the coldest months of the year, when temperatures hover in the single digits. As the Ladies’ Pond is a space that bans photography and discourages phones, it felt like a suitably challenging fieldsite in which to interrogate that perceived dichotomy of the “online” vs the “real world”; a seemingly analogue site supposedly unmediated by the digital. My methodology consisted of semi-structured interviews, participant observation, digital surveying, a load of multimedia content from voice memos to participants’ drawings to my own auto ethnography. (Eg, I did a lot of getting in the water with them.)
And indeed my findings showed that the tendrils of the digital reach far into the supposedly analogue space of the Ladies’ Pond, and much more besides. I loved doing this project and enjoyed building a home for it online; it taught me a lot about ethnography that I’ve taken into my research since.