Group items tagged

This is the site of the photographer from the BBC News piece on "A 13-year-old eagle huntress in Mongolia." His own account is completely different from the BBC article. He is not, as BBC portrayed him, an ethnographer who stumbled onto a cultural shift in gendered activities-he is a storyteller who went looking for an unusual story, and made it happen. "I had gone looking for my eagle huntress. . .I was amazed by her comfort and ease as she began handling the grand eagle for the first time in her life." I have the same question I asked on the bookmark for the BBC article; why was it important to the BBC to represent this story as ethnography?

Agreed - and even without the quotes, a casual observer could tell that these images are posed. However, I think portraiture-as-documentary photography raises some intriguing methodological questions/concerns. Considering the original piece was published through a (well-respected) international media organization, my guess is that some interesting conversations occurred during editorial meetings regarding the nature of Svidensky's work. Maybe this example points to the blurring lines between traditional news photography and pictures made for ethnographic purposes?

Quite possibly. And if that is the case, it is certainly evident in the two contrasting articles we have here. But I also wonder if we're not watching a paradigm shift to the photo-essay style that Svidensky is making use of. With the rising popularity of sites like Buzzfeed, I wonder if--in order to bring more interest to his work--he's utilizing that same style in hopes of being more "readable" for the masses. What will be interesting, though, is if we see a similar shift to the photo-essay from the sites that push traditional news photography.

This article is written from the computer science perspective on how social sciences are used to analyze Human-computer-interactions (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW). Tthis article is talking about how ethnomethodology can help computer scientist to design systems allowing people to interact in groups through technology and computer networking. The article is concern on people's behaviors that takes them to interact with the technology and how they do it, some of these points can be stretched and transfer to understanding the behaviors of individuals that interact in digital communities. It continues talking about the influence of the participant in the design of the technology, which brings to my mind the discussion about how the data gathering and "aggregation of information" shape the actions, the behaviors and the data available, which at the same time can dictate how the technology is been developed

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).

ABSTRACT: This article provides an account of the question of method as it relates to collective modes of research organised, conceived and produced through the interplay between digital technologies of communication and offline strategies of investigation. It does so by exploring the orchestration of research platforms, which are mediating devices that constitute the production of knowledge across a range of geocultural settings. In the context of a project entitled Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, the article maintains that research methods must contend with the ideological, technological and economic instruments that condition knowledge production at the current conjuncture. The platform, we argue, operates as a medium through which research, labour, subjectivity and knowledge are shaped in ways specific to hardware settings, software dynamics and the materialities of labour and life.

So I couldn't find this on our site so far, but I recently downloaded this app on my ipad. This program essentially allows you to mark up PDFs, articles, etc. by highlighting, taking notes, and so forth. It runs around $9.99, so I was a little hesitant at first, but this app is really valuable! I've always struggled to read articles paperless, and this app really helped by productivity levels skyrocket. You can also export your notes, so you can basically write your papers/etc. as you read. 

Project Witness is a video-advocacy initiative (Founded by Peter Gabriel) that seeks to provide video tools/strategies to document human rights abuses. Forrest posted a link a few weeks back to their video toolkit. I recently read about their new Labs project (a collaboration with The Guardian) in another article - particularly their Smart Cam Project which is an app that helps gather data that will support any video documentation in a court of law (who shot it, surrounding context to prove "is this for real!"). Their Obscura Cam is a way to blur the faces of people who wish to remain anonymous. Just Vision - an organization that supports communities documenting non-violent resistance (of Palestinian, Israeli, and foreign activists) of the occupation Palestinian territories - critiques Witness' evidence-based model, arguing that documenting atrocity in such a way only reinscribes and simplifies complex conflicts into perpetrator-victim narratives. That these narratives mobilize shame (and denial) rather than hope. I'm wondering what people think? I'll post another link to a relevant article here too.

ABSTRACT In this review essay, the academic merits of three anthropological blogs ("Savage Minds," "Zero Anthropology" [formerly "Open Anthropology"], and the official blog of the American Anthropological Association) are considered.

Here's a working academic blog, mostly on the writing process. https://lauraportwoodstacer.wordpress.com/

I appreciate the working academic blog. I might be interested in seeing two or three similar sites that are in dialogue with other another. Either people working on the same project or researchers in a similar field engaged in similar topics. This serves an obviously helpful role in garnering interested in your project.

Watson, N. "Why We Argue About Virtual Community: a Case Study of the Phish.net Fan Community." Communication Abstracts. 21.5 (1998). Print. This is a fabulous article - old, but solid on the fights about online vs. offline communities. I read it in a Digital Culture class in 2008. I cite it all the time, and would love to go back in light of our discussions in class. This might go well in week seven when we talk about online communities.

Please do, Mara. I really want to read this. Or I can scan a copy in Knight Ref.

Here is a link to a pdf I made of my copy. https://docs.google.com/open?id=0ByPQDYtlq5NmUlhYLXlIRHlnVkE Let me know if you would like it shared in another format. Can't wait to discuss this one!

I think this article is really spot on in providing an important model for empirically studying and representing the spread of ideas (or controversies) between media and how participatory and professional media influence one another. The fact that this article is written as much for academics as for activists is also exciting (and scary) to me, as a means of thinking about agenda-setting and influence. How might access to these tools help activist campaigns, and how might they swing back to challenge them? How can you really measure effect? "Even when we are able to access the data we need for analysis, interpretation is complicated by the specificity of individualized media experiences, where we've each curated our own individualized lists of sources on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This can leave us with very different understandings of the day's news. Is it possible to speak meaningfully about a media agenda when agendas are set by individuals following a combination of friends and professional sources they've chosen to meet personal preferences and needs?"

This is an interesting article I stumbled across the other day. It's discussion of changes in technology, methodology, and data and their influence on framing the popularity of music, particularly in regards to race, is really interesting.

"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.

This is the article by Henry Jenkins talking about the trends in young generations and their participation in the digital world creation. This article seem relevant because it explores how and why these digital communities are forming, which would give us a better sense of how to study them.

This article is really dense, bringing in a framework of participatory democratic society into on-line platforms. It is interesting concept but I have not been able to discern what the pilot project "Mobile Phones, Risk and Health" is about. Nonetheless, it poses good questions about who analyzes and constructs the data, the participants or the social scientist?

A useful article. I pulled out this section: "This confirms the willingness of cultural heritage institutions to start using new media resources and the improvements in accessibility that these new media technologies can offer. This being said, the range currently available leaves one with the distinct impression that it has been developed on an ad hoc basis, with public sentiments perhaps more important than a considered strategy." I wonder how much the development of this media has incorporated general public sentiment as opposed to public input into how they would like the media to look or be used.

An article to revisit the concepts of boundaries of communities

On taking risks in digital humanities.

This article provides some code snippets that can be used to query user data on Facebook via Facebook Query Language. It also describes how to use the Graph URL Scheme if you'd prefer to explore using URLs in your browser and not with code. Very useful for conducting online and virtual ethnographic research that entails Facebook users and communities.

A fascinating article about crowdsourcing and asking people online to help categorize images in the name of research! Presents an interesting take on highlighting the difference between what people and computers are capable of.

Great example of using digital tools to conduct ethnography. Notice that not only does the photographer/travel writer show his pictures to the source community on his laptop, but he's staged a photo of that. The documentarist's relationship with his subjects becomes part of the story selected by the BBC writer for our consumption. I've been trying to puzzle out why that is. Does today's BBC readership want or expect reassurance of ethical cultural fieldwork? Does that picture demystify our exotic "13-year-old eagle huntress," or does it reinforce a contrast between the modern and the traditional in Mongolia? I'd be very interested in your thoughts.

I think--looking at both articles--that it reinforces the "us" and "them" quality of the work. The idea that the US has that says, "Duh, girls can totally do that too" against the extraordinary existence of a huntress. --I was briefly skimming over the comments in other article and noticed this gem... "I raised my son and daughter on a ranch in Wyoming, USA, and I remember once when a Mongolian diplomat came to their "sister country" Wyoming to visit. I took my 9 year old daughter and he talked to her through a translator about horse races and archery. She was enthralled, since she'd been riding horses nearly since she was old enough to walk. Your story of the eagle hunters, and the young girl and her father, is very powerful." ...which I think illustrates the point. The way this girl's mother talks about "horse races and archery" like they are a totally foreign concept added the fact that she felt the need to add the bit about talking through a translator.