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Rosalynn Rothstein

The Object Ethnography Project - 27 views

While we are talking about this project, we should probably also take a look at this project (http://significantobjects.com/). This ended in the sale of the objects. From one of the steps of the pr...

week9

started by Rosalynn Rothstein on 04 Apr 12 8 follow-ups, last by Rosalynn Rothstein on 30 May 12
John Fenn

On Digital Ethnography, What do computers have to do with ethnography? (Part 1 of 3) | ... - 1 views

ethnographymatters.net/...rs-have-to-do-with-ethnography

ethnography digital

shared by John Fenn on 07 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 07 Dec 12
     
    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.
John Fenn

Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University - 4 views

sel.fas.harvard.edu

tools media research week8

shared by John Fenn on 21 May 12 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 21 May 12
     
    The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard is a unique collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies (VES). Harnessing perspectives drawn from the human sciences, the arts, and the humanities, the aim of SEL is to support innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography, with original nonfiction media practices that explore the bodily praxis and affective fabric of human existence. As such, it encourages attention to the many dimensions of social experience and subjectivity that may only with difficulty be rendered with words alone. SEL provides an academic and institutional context for the development of work which is itself constitutively visual or acoustic - that is conducted through audiovisual media rather than purely verbal sign systems - and which may thus complement the human sciences' and humanities' traditionally exclusive reliance on the written word. The instruction offered through SEL is thus distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it is practice-based, and promotes experimentation with culturally-inflected, nonfiction image-making.
  • ...1 more comment...
  • Mara Williams on 22 May 12
     
    First thought - awesome! What interesting work! Second thought - can we talk about the line between journalism and ethnography? I'm not sure how useful that distinction is, or how much I'm willing to fight about it. I'm excited by work that blurs the lines between art/ journalism/ ethnography. I would like to have a defense ready against folks who insist on discrete categories.
  • Savanna Bradley on 22 May 12
     
    Harvard seems to have a lot going on for it... In context for what we /do/ with digital ethnography materials, I wish that more of the projects that are featured were actually available for, at the very least, preview (at odds with the program's description of conduction through audiovisual media...). I wish I knew more about Zeega (and the apparent connection based on large logo presence on the projects page), even if it is only in alpha... http://zeega.org/about.php
  • Ed Parker on 22 May 12
     
    The projects at SEL provide a rich landscape for sensory/experiential exploration. This type of work really opens the mind to new perspectives and detail that is often exploited or skewed through popular media - like maintstream cinema or video games. Being a huge fan of the film "Where Eagles Dare" and the old SkyTram at Disneyland, I really enjoyed the Greunrekorder - Swiss Mountain Transport Systems sound recordings. I wonder if anyone has conducted similar research on the Portland Aerial Tram. Many of the trailers were exquisite, too. "Sweetgrass" looks to be an amazing documentary.
John Fenn

A defense of private-sector ethnography | Technology, Society, Change - 1 views

www.samladner.com/-of-private-sector-ethnography

ethnography research methods society change

shared by John Fenn on 13 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 13 Feb 14
     
    Sam Ladner writes on (and practices) ethnography in non-academic settings...eg. "private sector ethnography." While there is not much "digital" in her post here (a transcript of a plenary talk) with regards to overt subject matter, much of what she says intersects with how this course approaches the intersection of "digital" and "ethnography".
Brant Burkey

Bringing ethnography to a multimodal investigation of early literacy in a digital age - 2 views

qrj.sagepub.com/293

ethnography literacy digital multimodal week5 spaces read this article PDF

shared by Brant Burkey on 13 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Brant Burkey on 13 Apr 12
     
    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.
  • John Fenn on 16 Apr 12
     
    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".
  • John Fenn on 30 Apr 12
     
    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).
Rosalynn Rothstein

Sonic Ethnography - 5 views

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2012/05/01/sonic-ethnography-as-method-and-in-practice/ "Reflecting contemporary ethnographic research practices, sonic ethnography involves the interpret...

ethnography sonic ethnography anthropology week9

started by Rosalynn Rothstein on 15 May 12 no follow-up yet
Tongyu Wu

Studying Up: The Ethnography of Technologists | Ethnography Matters - 2 views

ethnographymatters.net/...studying-up

digital ethnography digital culture

shared by Tongyu Wu on 17 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Ethnography, they argue, provides thick, specific, contextualized understanding, which can complement and sometimes correct the findings of the more quantitative, formalized methods that dominate in tech companies.
  • it is also useful for understanding the processes through which technologies get built
John Fenn

Hypermedia Ethnography on a Shoestring | Flickr - Photo Sharing! - 1 views

www.flickr.com/...4996881007

ethnography research methods sharing photo

shared by John Fenn on 12 May 14 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 12 May 14
     
    Interesting poster from an EdD Candidate looking at "hypermedia ethnography" in a 2009 conference. Abstract appears alongside the Flickr image...
Savanna Bradley

Ethnography at Ethnographic Research, Inc. - 4 views

www.ethnographic-research.com

ethnography website week6

shared by Savanna Bradley on 17 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Savanna Bradley on 17 Apr 12
     
    Interesting use of web... see dishwasher study? and 'Ask Melinda' section
  • ...1 more comment...
  • anonymous on 08 May 12
     
    Looks like they've moved on to window air conditioning units.
  • Savanna Bradley on 08 May 12
     
    Too bad... how about this video on Consumer Insights Through Online Ethnography - a dishwasher study instead? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95fwpVSTgDM
  • Savanna Bradley on 08 May 12
     
    Or, this person's quote-ably "ethnographic" recount of using a washing machine for the first time in college... http://davista4.wordpress.com/sequence-1/
Savanna Bradley

The Location of Digital Ethnography - 3 views

www.google.com/url

ethnography digital

shared by Savanna Bradley on 01 May 12 - No Cached
  • Savanna Bradley on 01 May 12
     
    I am admittedly bad at finding links that aren't already posted here... I thought this person brought up some of the key points we have been discussing concerning where digital ethnography can take place in relation to traditional ethnographic terminology... specifically, defining a 'field site'... if this link works...
  • Maya Muñoz-Tobón on 01 May 12
     
    This is an interesting article about those domains where the ethnographic work takes place. I thought it was really interesting how the case study shows how civic engagement is enable in both "on-line" and "off-line", making me think of how we construct meanings about place and time, carrying out the conversations from on "space" to another.
John Fenn

Methods for Shaping Society | DMLcentral - 1 views

dmlcentral.net/...methods-shaping-society

methods digital read this week9

shared by John Fenn on 08 May 12 - No Cached
  • 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
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      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?
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 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
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      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
      Mara Williams on 29 May 12
       
      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
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      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
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      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
      John Fenn on 21 May 12
       
      Is this where "ethnographic" attention or impulse can fit?
    • Mara Williams
      Mara Williams on 29 May 12
       
      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.
  • Mara Williams on 29 May 12
     
    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?]
John Fenn

Digital Ethnography | Techneos Systems - 2 views

blog.techneos.com/...digital-ethnography

digital ethnography useless

shared by John Fenn on 29 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • John Fenn on 16 Apr 12
     
    Must have had promise when I linked to this back in March, but now I get a "404" when accessing...backing into the domain a bit yields a rather dramatic "untrusted connection" message from Firefox! Beware!
  • Savanna Bradley on 17 Apr 12
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