Unveiling and Engaging with the Humans of Networking Research

Abstract

Networking research often abstracts away the people who build, operate, and experience the Internet. Yet, human decisions shape what gets measured, which problems are prioritized, and how solutions are deployed. This paper argues that such human influence is foundational and deserves methodological attention. To do so, we discuss three well-known qualitative methods and approaches: participatory action research, ethnographic methods, and positionality as concrete ways of engaging with the social and operational realities that underlie technical systems. These approaches formalize processes that are commonly implicit in networking research, help surface questions that cannot be answered with traces alone, and make space for voices often left out of the research pipeline or are inadvertently concealed due to the lack of formal procedures to include them in our research methods. Ultimately, we argue for a broader understanding of legitimate, and sometimes informal, contributions to networking research—one that better reflects the human element of how the Internet is structured and is experienced.