Group items tagged

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?]

I was looking back at this (really interesting) multimedia writing work by Anne Wysocki and noticed how many of the pieces required special players and ample download time/space - Flash Player, Shockwave Player, 1.5 MB of download space - which got me thinking about platform/storage restrictions and digital accessibility. In many instances, a researcher may need not only specific digital skills/knowledge, but also specific platforms, players, software, memory space, etc. to conduct her work. And as players, platforms, software, etc. are upgraded, older digital texts may become less accessible. On that note, I have been taking screen shots of all of the scenes in the Facebook game I'm currently studying. Why? One reason is so I can put these screen shots into a presentation, but the more pressing reason is that another game I'm really interested in looking at (Food Force, a social media game from 2005 - so ancient, right?) is no longer accessible. In its place is a Facebook page with a big bandaged thumb and a "Sorry! This page has been removed." message. An ethnography conducted in a digital space, it seems, requires just as much "recording" as one in an offline space.

The life and preservation of the digital world is a huge question, and one that I don't think enough people are considering. I see more and more of my friends taking all their photos with smartphones and loading them to Instagram or Facebook, or worse never moving them beyond their phones. I wonder what photos will have survived in 20 years when their children are looking to make wedding or anniversary slide shows, or simply becoming interested in their own pasts. There are no hard copies of these images, and while hard copies are vulnerable, so are digital copies for a number of reasons.

great points in this discussion, especially around issues of "access"...which range from having the "right" tech to get into a site to ADA regulations/requirements. Also, preservation is a complicated facet of access and one worth discussing seriously in this course as we think about digital data.

ABSTRACT: Research on the digital and online environment poses several ethical questions that are new or, at least, newly pressing, especially in relation to youth. Established ethical practices require that research have integrity, quality, transparency, and impartiality. They also stipulate that risks to the researcher, institution, data, and participants should be anticipated and addressed. But difficulties arise when applying these to an environment in which the online and offline intersect in shifting ways. This paper discusses some real-life "digital dilemmas" to identify the emerging consensus among researchers. We note the 2012 guidelines by the Association of Internet Researchers, which advocates for ethical pluralism, for minimizing harm, and for the responsibility of the researcher where codes are insufficient. As a point of contrast, we evaluate Markham's (2012) radical argument for data fabrication as an ethical practice. In reflecting on how researchers of the digital media practices of youth resolve their dilemmas in practice, we take up Markham's challenge of identifying evolving practice, including researchers' workarounds, but we eschew her solution of fabrication. Instead, we support the emerging consensus that while rich data are increasingly available for collection, they should not always be fully used or even retained in order to protect human subjects in a digital world in which future possible uses of data exceed the control of the researcher who collected them.

Thanks for posting this, John. Considering the ethical concerns we all have expressed in class, I am sure this article will be helpful. I will be sure to put it on my reading list.

Editor's Note: While digital ethnography is an established field within ethnography, we don't often hear of ethnographers building digital tools to conduct their fieldwork. Wendy Hsu wants to change that. In the first of her three-part guest post series, she shows how ethnographers can use software, and even build their own software, to explore online communities. By drawing on examples from her own research on independent rock musicians, she shares with us how she moved from being an ethnographer of purely physical domains to an ethnographer who built software programs to gather more relevant qualitative data.

An article by Rosie Flewitt Provides insights that the well established traditions of ethnography can bring to the more recent analytic tools of multimodality in the investigation of early literacy practices.

Looks to be an article useful for Week 5, possibly Week 7; a recent look at how to use ethnographic "traditions" in a multimodal context. Topic concerns "literacies" for three and four year olds in the "digital age".

Here's the abstract: In this article I reflect on the insights that the well established traditions of ethnography can bring to the more recent analytic tools of multimodality in the investigation of early literacy practices. First, I consider the intersection between ethnography and multimodality, their compatibility and the tensions and ambivalences that arise from their potentially conflicting epistemological framings. Drawing on ESRC-funded case studies of three and four-year-old children's experiences of literacy with printed and digital media,1 I then illustrate how an ethnographic toolkit that incorporates a social semiotic approach to multimodality can produce richly situated insights into the complexities of early literacy development in a digital age, and can inform socially and culturally sensitive theories of literacy as social practice (Street, 1984, 2008).

Here is a link to San Francisco's center for digital storytelling. The website has a digital storytelling cookbook, a basic guide to digital storytelling including interview techniques and basics of final cut express. The following is out of the "overloaded memory bank" section of the cookbook: "construction system to assist us in this process. Images, videos, sounds, and other representations of events from our life can help us to reconstruct more complete memories and therefore expand the repertoire of story that we can put to use." What are the implications for memory, and storytelling, if it is being framed in the context of a more formal recorded digital story.

and here is the link (http://www.storycenter.org/). There are several videos on the site that might be interesting to check out as well.

The CHI Fieldschool is a unique experience that employs the model of an archaeological fieldschool (in which students come together for a period of 5 or 6 weeks to work on an archaeological site in order to learn how to do archaeology). Instead of working on an archaeological site, however, students in the CHI Fieldschool will come together to collaboratively work on several cultural heritage informatics projects. In the process they will learn a great deal about what it takes to build applications and digital user experiences that serve the domain of cultural heritage - skills such as programming, media design, project management, user centered design, digital storytelling, etc.

see here for slide show: http://www.slideshare.net/chris_khalil/the-new-digital-ethnographers-toolkit-capturing-a-participants-lifestream

The Center for Media Justice presents some great material, particularly as an entry point to undergrads on concepts of media justice and examining the ways oppression operates in a digital sphere, troubling open internet and "closing digital divides" Great stuff!

"n this article, we use digital technologies (the Subcam and Webdiver) to capture, share and analyze collectively specific user experience. We examine the transition between 'outside' and 'inside' when people come home, and the steps needed to build the 'being-at-home' feeling" (from Abstract)

Might be nice to read this in either week 6 or 7, depending on how other readings stack up. Looks to have been published in 2010, and the mash of digital tech and domestic space might give us some great ideas to discuss.

Still need a digital tool for your presentation? Here is a list (made by some folks at IU) that I found after some google-ing. "On May 24, 2010 the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology held a meetup for purposes of discussing digital tools of use for field and archival research in these fields. These links were compiled for, during, and after the gathering and are preserved here for the use of participants and interested others."

Watkins studies young people's social and digital media behaviors. He teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, in the departments of Radio-Television-Film, Sociology, and the Center for African and African American Studies. C.

this is all you really need to read (abstract/chapter intro...): New technologies represent a system of constraints and possibilities that constitute the foundation of new rhetorical spaces: the spheres of new communicative and persuasive procedures. Nowadays, urban planning has the chance to critically and rigorously experiment with these new spaces. It has the chance to transgress traditional representational codes and to expand its semantic horizons. This chapter portrays one such challenging exploration: the fecund crossroads between qualitative analytical approaches and digital languages within the planning field. It is a path that embraces diverse dimensions media and messages, analysis and rhetoric, ethics and aesthetics.

I only read the first 15 pages or so of this chapter through Google Books preview - but - I loved it. It's beautifully written (jargon-y at times, but it's good for the genre). Plus, it works as a manifesto for the kinds digital ethnographies I want to read/experience. The best part for me was the author's focus on "multi -sensory aesthetics" in digital ethnographies. It's worth a block quote: Understanding that reason doesn't produce the totality of our actions, to create real communicative space, and induce peoples to act it is not enough to "tell" rather it is s necessary to transfer energies, make sentiments, and emotions vibrate, awaken latent aspirations, knowledge and enrages, rediscovering the powerful role of artistic and poetic languages. It is necessary to focus on the cognitive and communicative performance of aestehec pleasure, a pleasure that is not an accessory but rather a central moment of very communicative process.

quite robust listing of issues, possibilities, pitfalls, and facets related to research through/on the Internet...as of 2008. No solutions offered nor is there much analysis; a primer with a good bibliography

This is a pretty interesting article about the guidelines as to what digital citizenship truly means, and how it exists. There are nine aspects I feel directly affect the ethnography aspect we investigate every week of the digital world, and might possibly add to our perspective as to how the general population views joining the digital community.

The Interest Group for Digital Practices in History and Ethnography will address the data concerns of history as a research domain and those of the ethnographic disciplines (including cultural anthropology, folklore studies, ethnomusicology, interpretive sociology, and science and technology studies). This group proposes to build a medium sized tent (smaller than the whole of the digital humanities or of the social sciences, larger than a particular discipline) to explore strategies and frameworks for the collaborative care and use of research data of diverse types.

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.

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...)

The website contains the following statement under the heading "Intellectual Property and Ethical Issues": "Ethical considerations are handled primarily by individual depositors, based on (a) their arrangements with their primary consultants regarding consent and permission and (b) their concern for materials they do not wish to make public. While guidelines for ethical ethnographic research behavior have been around for many years, the methods of gathering permissions for recordings have varied widely in the decades since video technology has been employed as part of fieldwork" This seems to bring to light the concerns being presented when dealing with materials recorded over a large time period, where ethical considerations chanced considerably. This might be a good project to talk about when we are discussing the ethics of digitization.