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Mara Williams

Internet World Maps - 1 views

www.labnol.org/...1489

digital culture media week5 domain visualization blog post censorship mapping read this

shared by Mara Williams on 30 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Mara Williams on 30 Apr 12
     
    I'm taking this week's idea of "domains" a bit literally. Here's a quick blog post from Amit Agarwal (tech columnist for Wall Street Journal India). It links to several visualizations of internet activity. Some are physical: electricity; some are political (i.e. explicitly - all these maps are political!): censorship by country; some are social: use of SNS by country, the first edition of the xckd map of internet communities.* He offers these maps without much commentary. I'm interested in how these visual representations could help us think about the "where" of digital ethnography. My offline/physical context may be a coffee shop in Eugene, OR, am I also placed on these maps? What kinds of maps help you think about the "where" of the internet? * The second edition is worth looking at to think about the way time and technological development shapes our understanding of space.
  • Mara Williams on 30 Apr 12
     
    Here's a link to the second version of the xckd map of internet communities. https://xkcd.com/802/ While not a "real" map, I often use it in presentations to explain the idea that online communities are particular and exist in relation to each other. I often pair it with the concept of "fractalized communities" found in Patrica Lange's work in youtube video bloggers. Both get at the specificity of online research; there isn't one internet that I can study - I can only tell you about my time in this particular community.
John Fenn

Methods for Shaping Society | DMLcentral - 1 views

dmlcentral.net/...methods-shaping-society

methods digital read this week9

shared by John Fenn on 08 May 12 - No Cached
  • Research methods are routinely understood as objective techniques for getting to know the world. Yet they may be more influential and socially significant than this, particularly as more digital methods are being developed and deployed. So what, too, do digital methods do?
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      post focused on 'digital media and learning' field, but how might these questions apply to "ethnography"?
  • However, underpinning the technicality of methods is the assumption that they are able to capture and represent the world just as it is. Methods are understood rather like a photographic device that can capture, freeze-frame and reproduce a facsimile of reality. As researchers, we can say we've done a good job if our methods have been up to the job of capturing a picture of an objective reality as it really is—or at least pretty accurately so.
  • But much the same can be said of anthropological ethnographers returning from fieldwork. Their fieldnotes, photographs, dictaphone recordings, transcripts and video data are much like the neuroscientist's CAT and PET scans. They represent a reality—a human brain, a culture, whatever—that has been recorded and made presentable enough for interpretation. But are research methods really so objective? Or do they do other things?
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It is that our research methods may in some important ways fabricate the very things we want to observe.
  • Methods are not neutral or innocent tools but necessarily construct, shape, configure, frame and make up the social worlds they study—methods help create society.
  • in 18th and 19th century map-making and census-taking, as well as popular contemporary methods such as sample surveys and focus groups, and the emergence of new digital methods in the 21st century.
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      implication/application for this line of inquiry re: digital ethnography (across the many manifestations we've encountered thus far...)? Also, how do methods of "analysis" figure in to this conversation?
    • Mara Williams
      Mara Williams on 29 May 12
       
      One way into this may be to carry out the author's exercise on the subject of the focus group (social, able to make choices, able to be influenced, likes sandwiches) on the subject of digital research. The piles of ideological baggage from the offline world are still in place - but what changes online? I'm really struggling with this one - maybe it's the water I'm swimming in - but I'm finding it difficult to describe (with any degree of texture) my online activity as separate from offline life.
  • Such details demonstrate the importance of recognizing the social life of methods. These are not neutral tools but politically charged instruments.
  • Methods are also social, however, because they in turn help to shape that social world—or, as it's put in the social life of methods program, methodologically speaking “what you see is what you get.”
  • Important questions are raised for research in digital media and learning by these insights. Newer forms of digital methods are now being developed and deployed that will enable researchers to make data on learning in new kinds of ways.
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      To the point of questions/applicability around 'digital ethnography'...
  • open source social analytics are all beginning to change the ways in which learning can be tracked, recorded, visualized, patterned, documented and presented
  • Is this a big deal? If methods allow us to know more, then doesn't that mean we can intervene more effectively to improve learning? Isn't making new social worlds an admirable aim? Maybe so
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      the ethical dilema...and not necessarily a 'new' one when it comes to ethnographic work; but what changes with the "digital"?
  • Perhaps the key point to be made about many such digital methods is that they generate transactional data without the awareness or intervention of research subjects—we are being aggregated as research data based on our transactions online without even thinking about it.
  • Digital media and learning research traces learning processes as they occur in new digital and networked spaces where they are inseparable from transactional data.
  • Yet one risk, as we have seen, is that the rise of digital methods has begun to emphasize transactional data over human participation in research
    • John Fenn
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      Is this where "ethnographic" attention or impulse can fit?
    • Mara Williams
      Mara Williams on 29 May 12
       
      That seems to be the argument - though it could be clearer. Transactional material != social and human activity. Perhaps an integrated approach that combines the transactional traces with stories from "actual" humans.
  • Mara Williams on 29 May 12
     
    I really like this piece! I'm not super familiar with DML as a field, but the author's attention to the world-making capabilities (and not even capabilities - it's built in or "politically preloaded") of research methods. The post provides a clear defense against those who would argue that research is just objectively recording the world. At the same time, it doesn't slip into a poststructuralist wormhole about meaning. There's an attention to politics here that 's fruitful [Ah! but politics in general.. What are this author's projects' politics? What departmental/ disciplinary political fights shape the ground on which DML research takes place?]
Erin Zysett

Valsetz, OR lives online - 1 views

valsetz.homestead.com/INDEX.html

shared by Erin Zysett on 14 May 14 - No Cached
  • Erin Zysett on 14 May 14
     
    So this is an interesting extension to the Electronic Evergreen. This website was create in the late 90s to commemorate the company town of Valsetz, OR that was leveled in 1984. The graphics alone are a time capsule. The interesting thing is that even thought the last face to face reunion was in 2006 (as far as I can tell) the most recent blog post was December of 2013. Also, there are very recent posts in the forum section. The website is so poorly designed that it's hard to navigate, but there is a lot of fascinating information here and it is a prime example of a real life community being displaced into cyber space.
  • Erin Zysett on 14 May 14
     
    There was a documentary made about it as well. It's trailer can be viewed here: http://youtu.be/Y1jO5bmmBkM
Rosalynn Rothstein

The Role and Future of Web Archives - 1 views

http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/05/a-vision-of-the-role-and-future-of-web-archives-conclusions-and-the-role-of-archives/ This short post points out three roles of web archives: preser...

archive preservation tools

started by Rosalynn Rothstein on 30 May 12 no follow-up yet
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