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Researchers can use data visualization techniques to explore, analyze, and present data in new ways. Although quantitative data are visualized most often, recent innovations have brought attention to the potential benefits of visualizing qualitative data. In this article, the authors demonstrate one way researchers can use networks to analyze and present ethnographic interview data. The authors suggest that because many respondents know one another in ethnographic research, networks are a useful tool for analyzing the implications of respondents' familiarity with one another. Moreover, respondents often share familiar cultural references that can be visualized. The authors show how visualizing respondents' ties in conjunction with their shared cultural references sheds light on the different systems of meaning that respondents within a field site use to make sense of the social phenomena under investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly debates on sex dolls tend to view them in one of two ways. Either the purchase and use of sex dolls reflects and exacerbates misogyny, or that dolls are themselves a technological marvel meeting an array of sexual and emotional needs in sex negative cultures. I complicate these views by analyzing how and why heterosexual men personify their hyperreal sex toys in conventionally feminine, albeit hypersexualized, ways. Drawing on digital ethnographic observations and interviews with 41 love and sex doll owners who use digital media to personify their dolls, I suggest that the creation of hyper-gendered doll personas tends to reproduce culturally specific gender norms due to social dynamics within the community. Specifically, I show how doll community norms privilege heterosexual masculinity and thus limit the doll personas that are imagined and created. By focusing on the social practices of this community rather than how sex dolls are designed, this research suggests a way for scholars to be critical of taboos against technologically assisted sexual pleasure while acknowledging the tendency of futuristic sex practices to reproduce social inequalities. Implications for how future sexual technologies could someday challenge status-quo inequalities are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]