Group items tagged

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'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.

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.

From the website: The Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) is a key component of the Museum of Anthropology's Renewal Project, "A Partnership of Peoples." In addition to the RRN, the Renewal Project comprises several complementary and innovative components, including a new Research Centre, Major Temporary Exhibition Gallery, and Community Suite. Together, they support collaborative, socially responsible, and interdisciplinary research across local, national, and international borders. The RRN is an online tool to facilitate reciprocal and collaborative research about cultural heritage from the Northwest Coast of British Columbia. The RRN enables communities, cultural institutions and researchers to work together. Members can build their own projects, collaborate on shared projects, upload files, hold discussions, research museum projects, and create social networks. For both communities and museums, the RRN is groundbreaking in facilitating communication and fostering lasting relationships between originating communities and institutions around the world.

There is not much access to the site without an account, so I requested one. I am interested in looking at how this site functions (where there seem to be numerous projects being created with the materials) in contrast with the Danish Folklore Nexus I posted earlier. Both resources might offer insight in to how new projects are being created with already collected materials.

I finally got an account set up and was able to look around the webpage. The images are worth looking at in the very least, although it looks like you have to join sections to see what is going on with projects. You can also see "user submitted" information in a specific heading to see what information users have contributed to the objects.

Berry Wellman has ben doing research on communities, social networks, and the internet for a long time. His work may be of interest to some of you all who are interested in how online resources affect the composition of off-line networks and communities. You can find his CV and a link to his personal website here if you like. 

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.

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."

An article to revisit the concepts of boundaries of communities

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

Here is one of the articles I mentioned in class today. It was written by Keith Hampton and Berry Wellman is called "Neighboring in Netville: How the Internet Supports Community and Social Capital in a Wired Suburb.

Thanks!

The example of a web forum turning their "newbie" section into essentially an "unconverted" section very interesting example of how communities separate "us" and "them." I don't know how broadly we can apply that example, though. Vegans are an easy target as a community that identifies largely in opposition to an "other," since most definitions of veganism lay out what vegans *don't* do, eg use animal products. I'd be interested to see if other communities with, for lack of better phrasing, more "positive" or additive identifications, similarly segregate "others" on their sites. Then of course the question becomes, what do the "others" get out of being segregated on a community's site? Do they have their own subcommunity?

I do believe that it was religious scholar Robert Ellwood that said that a group most identifies in what they are not. So I do think that they create their own subcommunity, because they are identifying with the fact that they are the "other" and that they are not the "us." To give a real life example (but not a digital one, sorry) Dianic Paganism was created in response to second-wave feminism, they did not allow men into their circles. In response, you see this rise of men-only circles.

For those interesting in online communities, gaming or otherwise, you may find this article and the related book interesting.

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.

The Wayback Machine! This is a great tool for retrieving old copies of web sites or completely defunct/ missing websites. It has been helpful for me to delve into everyday digital content (calendars, announcements, etc.) that wasn't archived clearly. It also gave me access to abandoned sites years after the community had moved on.

And, depending on the site, can be a sort of auto-ethnographic document or snapshot...great for comparing design changes and/or significant shifts that might occur when a community changes (rather than moves on). Sort of an archaeology, I suppose.

[Synopsis] This book is a critical and ethnographic study of camgirls: women who broadcast themselves over the web for the general public while trying to cultivate a measure of celebrity in the process. The book's over-arching question is, "What does it mean for feminists to speak about the personal as political in a networked society that encourages women to 'represent' through confession, celebrity, and sexual display, but punishes too much visibility with conservative censure and backlash?" The narrative follows that of the camgirl phenomenon, beginning with the earliest experiments in personal homecamming and ending with the newest forms of identity and community being articulated through social networking sites like Live Journal, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. It is grounded in interviews, performance analysis of events transpiring between camgirls and their viewers, and the author's own experiences as an ersatz camgirl while conducting the research.

This study (and its author) is mentioned in this week's reading 'Digital Ethnography : An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research' by Dhiraj Murthy. Dissertation Remarks and Synopsis (from Theresa Senft's website) http://www.terrisenft.net/diss/synopsis.php#remarks

This curated collection of online tools, tutorials and resources is designed to help nonprofits and ethnic and community news organizations navigate the often intimidating and ever-evolving new media landscape. Whether you're a beginner or a pro, you will find valuable information on the technologies and best practices you need to tell a community's stories in compelling ways; engage new audiences; optimize your website; and measure online impact.

I haven't been able to find a free online copy of this yet. It looks very helpful. Has anyone else been able to secure one? The title reminds me of Patrica Lange's piece on YouTube and "publicly private" and "privately pubic" online spaces. Her application of the idea of "fractalized communities" has been very useful to my research on out-of-the-way online communities. Check that one out at http://uolibraries.worldcat.org/title/publicly-private-and-privately-public-social-networking-on-youtube/oclc/726935972&referer=brief_results

I have not been able to find one either, although I was able to find proof chapters of another two articles in the book.