Group items tagged

"The computer science research community is going full speed ahead developing exciting new algorithms, but it seems a bit disconnected from what it takes to get their work used."

I thought this article is interesting, basically you need to understand more than just computer science to develop a program that is usable to a particular group.

This is a book that I have read through in my previous attempts to approach the online-life of legends and ghost narratives. I found it really helpful to see how Kinsella approached the online community, and perhaps this might help some of you to read through some of his ideas. 

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.

This is an art installation from 1980 of a large video chat between people in LA and New York. It deals with time and space. It is really interesting to see peoples reactions to this new form of communication.

This is the last of the tools that I talked about last week. Scripto is a community transcripting tool--should anyone have need of one--and works with both large and small groups. There is also the option to keep the community private.

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.

An organization that uses an internet platform to assist planning agencies and consultants in allowing citizens to participate in decision-making efforts.

Just to piggy-back off of my last post - I read this piece by Eve Tuck recently and I think it's really powerful. In her letter, Tuck calls on communities, researchers to reconsider the long-term impact of "damage-centered research" - research that seeks to document peoples' pain and brokenness to hold those in power accountable for their oppression." Speaking to Witness' approach, this quote was particularly salient: "It is a powerful idea to think of all of us as litigators, putting the world on trial, but does it actually work? Do the material and political wins come through? And, most importantly, are the wins worth the long- term costs of thinking of ourselves as damaged?"

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.

From the website: "The Society for Visual Anthropology (SVA) is a section of the American Anthropological Association. We promote the study of visual representation and media. Both research methods and teaching strategies fall within the scope of the society. SVA members are involved in all aspects of production, dissemination, and analysis of visual forms. Works in film, video, photography, and computer-based multimedia explore signification, perception, and communication-in-context, as well as a multitude of other anthropological and ethnographic themes.The Society encourages the use of media, including still photography, film, video and non-camera generated images, in the recording of ethnographic, archaeological and other anthropological genres. Members examine how aspects of culture can be pictorially/visually interpreted and expressed, and how images can be understood as artifacts of culture.

Explore this place! This is a searchable collection of links to tools to help researchers conceive a project, collect data, organize and analyze it (including sections on mapping and data visualization), write, and publish. It is organized into intuitive categories based on what you want to do. Within each category, you can order the results by cost, platform, etc. This would be a great place to find tools for the toolplay workshops.

From their description of the project "Bamboo DiRT is the tool-centric node in what its developers hope will be a growing ecosystem of specialized directories that can achieve sustainability by combining topical focus with seamless data exchange where appropriate." I could see how this resource would be helpful if you were thinking about how far you needed to go with the data you have collected.

This tool seems pretty simple. It is a audio voice recorder that lets you annotate an event. But apparently, you can use it on your smartphone and it time stamps the recording. http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/rehearsalassist/wiki

I learned about this program while reading "Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture:Media Education for the 21st Century" by Henry Jenkins, Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This is an interesting program were users of video games interact and remix the games to create their own movies and story lines. This brings more platforms for individuals to create self-representations in a digital form, bringing forward the possibilities of reinterpretation of cultural objects and creative participation of digital communities

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.

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!

By revealing the social networks present within the urban environment, Invisible Cities describes a new kind of city-a city of the mind. It displays geocoded activity from online services such as Twitter and Flickr, both in real-time and in aggregate. Real-time activity is represented as individual nodes that appear whenever a message or image is posted. Aggregate activity is reflected in the underlying terrain: over time, the landscape warps as data is accrued, creating hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data.

Might be interesting to download the software and see what comes of this multimodal effort...takes geocoded activity from social media and "maps" it to an "immersive three dimensional space." While not ethnographic in any proper/traditional sense, this tool foregrounds questions about community, public-ness, social practice, and digitally-enabled culture...