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John Fenn

The new digital ethnographer's toolkit: capturing the participant's lifestream | Chris ... - 1 views

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?]
Staci Tucker

Fraps - Game Video Capture - 1 views

http://www.fraps.com/

video games screen capture record tools

started by Staci Tucker on 04 Jun 12 no follow-up yet
Jenny Dean

Portraits of Reconciliation - NYTimes.com - 4 views

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    Definitely a must view. It is an amazing piece of work."Last month, the photographer Pieter Hugo went to southern Rwanda, two decades after nearly a million people were killed during the country's genocide, and captured a series of unlikely, almost unthinkable tableaus."
John Fenn

Rhizome | The Art of Fieldwork - 4 views

  • The role of “artist in residence” on a scientific expedition is a malleable one, without clearly defined parameters, thus Ga decided that her project would be to become the ship’s archivist, attempting to capture the various facets of life aboard the Tara
    • John Fenn
       
      An ethnographic flavor emerges here...esp. the "facets of life" element.
  • Ga is one of a number of younger contemporary artists whose work is tied to a kind of artistic fieldwork, investigating aspects of their lives and interests by merging the apparent objectivity of documentary forms and anthropological research with a plainly subjective, flexible approach, drawing on multiple methodologies and discourses.
    • John Fenn
       
      use of "apparent" and "plainly" modifiers here stand out to me as rhetorical valuation of practices (anthropology vs. art)
  • her work as “performative investigations,”
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  • ry, and animation, the project equally reflects Jordenö’s concern with the implications of her anthropological approach and her own shifting relationship to the subjects of her inquiry:
    • John Fenn
       
      something ethnographers in the anthropological tradition have been doing for some time...though mainly in print.
  • For a younger generation of artists, for whom the use of technology is natural and the Internet an inextricable part of information gathering, the ability to adopt these various strategies and roles is greatly enhanced by the accessibility of information: in an Internet age, the barriers to research begin to collapse.
    • John Fenn
       
      what happens with this sentence if we swap in "ethnographers" for "artists"?
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    An admittedly vague response: http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/Foster.pdf see page 305, "...a kind of ethnographer-envy consumes artists..."
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    This is also kind of interesting: http://www.lindalai-floatingsite.com/content/video/data/unpublished/Excitable-Speech_Cinderella/index.html ; the person putting together this site has a number of 'ethnographic' videos, which she accompanies with a section entitled "Concept/artist statement", suggesting the ethnographer as an artist...
Savanna Bradley

Using digital technology for collective ethnographic observation: An experiment on 'com... - 5 views

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    "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)
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    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.
John Fenn

What is a Subcultural Scene? | BenjaminWoo.net - 2 views

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    I really like the concept of "scene," as it is applied here. The author uses it to mean the ways groups of people gather in clusters historically, emotionally, and physically. He argues the term avoids the "fetishiz­ing tendencies of subcultural theory". Does it, though? If mapping and analyzing subcultures brings with it a temptation to nail down hierarchies of taste cultures (as in - "my study of zine making shows this is a real zine, that is not" - a temptation that looms even bigger for those of us who try to study our own subcultures), how does scene help us avoid that? Might I be tempted to flash my knowledge of the scene/ being a scenester in ways that produce the same effect? The visualizations help map out the fluid connection between actors and organizations. Describing local fan communities as "a nexus of niches" is tremendously helpful. I'd be interested to see this kind of network analysis applied to online fandoms across platforms. Thinking about the graph though, I'm not sure I need it to understand what he found. It looks cool (and bonus - !science), but I could do just as well without it. If the graph isn't supporting the argument - what is it doing? Final note - I like the choice of the word "patronage" - it may capture something really interesting about the relational and inter-generational aspect of scenes!
Staci Tucker

ScreenFlow - Screen Capture Software - 0 views

http://www.telestream.net/screen-flow/

video games record tools

started by Staci Tucker on 04 Jun 12 no follow-up yet
John Fenn

Record Skype Video and Audio Calls with Evaer video call recorder | Save Skype video me... - 1 views

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    I really have liked using this tool with the minimal experience I've had with it thus far. I would really like to learn how to do the split screen and also learn this point they noted: Option to record both sides sound, local sound only and remote sound only. - See more at: http://www.evaer.com/#sthash.NjDc1JRN.dpuf
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    This looks like a very useful and user-friendly application. I have always found video interviews difficult to deal with in terms of capturing/transcribing so many thanks for passing this along. I had trouble downloading the trial version on my MacBook Pro for some reason. Looking for troubleshooting info.
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    I also found this one - appears to be more Mac specific: http://www.ecamm.com/mac/callrecorder/
Erin Zysett

Looking out and Looking In: Ethnographic Evaluation as a Two-Way Mirror - 1 views

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    This is an interesting case study on how ethnographic methods are being used by arts and cultural groups to help make their case to funders. "There is growing pressure to provide concrete evidence of impact to funders and institutional and civic leaders. And yet, numbers and metrics rarely capture the complex individual transformation and collective social change at the heart of many impactful community-based arts and humanities-based endeavors. Stories and qualitative data more readily meet the challenge but are often viewed as "soft" evidence. How can we reap the valuable content- and context-rich learning that qualitative approaches to assessment afford, while enhancing the credibility of qualitative evidence toward more effective case making?"
Staci Tucker

HyperCam - Screen Capture Software - 1 views

http://www.hyperionics.com/hc/

record tools digital video

started by Staci Tucker on 04 Jun 12 no follow-up yet
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