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Aylie B

Guides - Source: An OpenNews project - 1 views

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    Wow! poked around just a little bit - great open-source tutorials on accessing census data, representing data in maps, creating news apps, coding, as well as some more manifesto-y pieces on new directions! "Source Guides are collections of tutorials, project discussions, and advice on topics of interest to developers and interactive designers in newsrooms. Is there a Guide topic missing that you'd like to see here?"
Aylie B

ARCTIC PERSPECTIVE INITIATIVE - 0 views

shared by Aylie B on 10 Apr 14 - No Cached
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    Marko Pelijhan is an incredible digital artist, a lot of his work comments on surveillance. This project is a cool collaboration with North and Arctic Peoples and climate scientists - and brings up some important questions for me around open authoring and traditional ecological knowledge, how might platforms like this incorporate the necessary feedback loops or knowledge-ownership protocols of a particular person/group. How do you protect the sacred in the digital sphere? "The Arctic Perspective Initiative (API) is a non-profit, international group of individuals and organizations, founded by Marko Peljhan and Matthew Biederman, whose goal is to promote the creation of open authoring, communications and dissemination infrastructures for the circumpolar region. Its aim is to work with, learn from, and empower the North and Arctic Peoples through open source technologies and applied education and training. By creating access to these technologies while promoting the creation of shared communications and data networks without costly overheads, continued and sustainable development of autonomous culture, traditional knowledge, science, technology and education opportunities for peoples in the North and Arctic regions is enabled."
John Fenn

Versus, the real-time lives of cities | [ AOS ] Art is Open Source - 1 views

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    VersuS is a series of works about the possibility to listen in real-time to the emotions, expressions and information generated by users on social network and using ubiquitous technologies, and to publish them onto the cities which they are related to. A scenario emerges according to which it becomes possible to realize information landscapes which are ubiquitously accessible and which change our experience or urban spaces. These projects also suggest the possibility to use these methodologies and technologies to promote novel forms of participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design.
  • ...1 more comment...
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    Found this via comments section on the Rhizome piece that Rosalynn posted...
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    Interesting how this intersects with Meta-Nerd's idea of "scenes." The video is interesting - it plays without sound, and provides very little context (sns platforms, time scales, etc). For me, this made the video less a visualization of data than a weird, undulating monster (or earthquake? Why am I using negative metaphors?). Without the context, it veers away from a piece that will make an argument about the role of social media "in today's society." I appreciate that, even as I want to critique the video for not providing the promised "participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design."
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    This is quite fascinating! The notion of mapping conversations on social networks with /place/ opens many pathways to exploration and innovation. I wonder if the 3D visualization software will be released to the open source community.
Ed Parker

Timeline - 2 views

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    Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use. Document History Connected: Timeline is also great for pulling in media from different sources. It has built in support for pulling in Tweets and media from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud. More media types will be supported in the future. Timeline is open source and could be quite useful for mashing together different types of content associated with ethnography projects.
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    What a great tool, Ed! Thanks for sharing! Now I feel like I need to think of a project where I can use this.
Mara Williams

Queer Zine Archive Project - 6 views

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    This is the digital arm of the diy zine archiving project I have been involved with for years. Check out the about section for explanations of collective structure, tools used to build the site, and connection to other diy archives.
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    Super cool project, Mara! I like how the mission statement notes that QZAP is a "living history," and that the members are also documenting the history of hardware/software used to create this digital platform where the archived history of these zines lives. (I'm not sure if that last sentence makes sense, but hopefully you know what I mean...)
John Fenn

Methods for Shaping Society | DMLcentral - 1 views

  • 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
       
      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?
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  • 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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      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
       
      Is this where "ethnographic" attention or impulse can fit?
    • Mara Williams
       
      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.
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    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?]
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