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Kelly Heckman

Periscopic Play: re-positioning "the field" in MMO studies - 9 views

I agree the argument has overtones of the emic/etic perspectives I believe in this instance there is a difference. When one leaves to study a culture in Cameroon, one can become "awed" by the cultu...

methods research MMO games ethnography read this week7 week8 article PDF

started by Kelly Heckman on 13 Apr 12 2 follow-ups, last by Kelly Heckman on 16 Apr 12
John Fenn

Rhizome | The Art of Fieldwork - 4 views

rhizome.org/...artist-ethnographer

ethnography art mimetic inquiry post read this week8 interpretation methods

shared by John Fenn on 10 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • 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
      John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
       
      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
      John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
       
      use of "apparent" and "plainly" modifiers here stand out to me as rhetorical valuation of practices (anthropology vs. art)
  • her work as “performative investigations,”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 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
      John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
       
      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
      John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
       
      what happens with this sentence if we swap in "ethnographers" for "artists"?
  • Savanna Bradley on 30 Apr 12
     
    An admittedly vague response: http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/Foster.pdf see page 305, "...a kind of ethnographer-envy consumes artists..."
  • Savanna Bradley on 30 Apr 12
     
    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

Blogging Anthropology: Savage Minds, Zero Anthropology, and AAA Blogs - Price - 2010 - ... - 5 views

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/...pdf

digital ethnography anthropology pdf week9 read this tools

shared by Savanna Bradley on 09 Apr 12 - No Cached
  • Savanna Bradley on 09 Apr 12
     
    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.
  • ...4 more comments...
  • John Fenn on 16 Apr 12
     
    I'd suggest we take a closer look at this article toward the end of the term (specifically week 9), as we consider the multiple opportunities for "publishing" in the digital era; blogs have begun to end up as research tools in a number of ways, and this article will push us toward larger debates about academic communication/publishing that are raging all around...
  • Kelly Heckman on 16 Apr 12
     
    I know the owner of Savage Minds if we want to talk with him. Please let me know.
  • Mara Williams on 29 May 12
     
    Blogging affords a saoln-like place of exploration - sure. I was underwhelmed by this piece - but the context is probably helpful. The piece is a review. In that it is treating blogging seriously by performing a review in a respectable journal, I appreciate it. However, I want to poke at the edge what tools are acceptable - blogs seem respectable here. That's great, and very professional. But when I want a tool that will help me think through something, I'd rather use something that is less polished. Also a way to engage non-anthropologists - but are academic blogs engaging? Some are - I'm interested in how to create a non-boring academic blog. The end of the review gets at this problem - the author hopes the official AAA blog will use the format to spark debate and create interesting writing; but the status of it as an official blog makes that difficult. The front page is here http://blog.aaanet.org/ I would be interested in what folks think of it in light of this piece.
  • Maya Muñoz-Tobón on 29 May 12
     
    It is interesting how this article brings in the important aspect of collaboration and peer reviews, when analyzing and ethnographic work. The participation of readers and contributors in these blogs range from professional anthropologist to just interested readers, which causes an unbalance on what traditionally has been a seen as peer review work. The multi-directional and multilevel dialogue on these blogs create that malleability of the boundaries of the uses, effects and design of the ethnographic work. This act of participatory input from "multiple voices" makes the presentation of the ethnographic/anthropological work as another "subject" to be studied and analyze, it becomes an auto-reflection of the methodological design of the ethnographic work itself. Presenting the ethnographic work in a blogging format brings more levels of analyzing the data and the interpretation of this data.
  • Mara Williams on 29 May 12
     
    Here's a working academic blog, mostly on the writing process. https://lauraportwoodstacer.wordpress.com/
  • Rosalynn Rothstein on 30 May 12
     
    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.
Brant Burkey

The Society for Visual Anthropology - 1 views

societyforvisualanthropology.org

ethnography digital media visual photography video film representation

shared by Brant Burkey on 21 Apr 12 - Cached
  • Brant Burkey on 21 Apr 12
     
    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.
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?]
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
John Fenn

The Art of Fieldwork via Rhizome - 4 views

ran across this project/post earlier in the year, and really appreciate the multimodal approach to documentation & interpretation. As I look over it again, I'm thinking we should talk about the rel...

fieldwork art archivist performance

started by Rosalynn Rothstein on 04 Apr 12 1 follow-up, last by John Fenn on 10 Apr 12
John Fenn

The battle for 'Trayvon Martin': Mapping a media controversy online and off-line | Grae... - 6 views

firstmonday.org/...3821

methods media research digital culture mapping

shared by John Fenn on 04 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Aylie B on 09 Apr 14
     
    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?"
emknott

Digital Practices in History and Ethnography IG - 0 views

www.rd-alliance.org/508

digital ethnography tools

shared by emknott on 01 May 14 - No Cached
  • emknott on 01 May 14
     
    The Interest Group for Digital Practices in History and Ethnography will address the data concerns of history as a research domain and those of the ethnographic disciplines (including cultural anthropology, folklore studies, ethnomusicology, interpretive sociology, and science and technology studies). This group proposes to build a medium sized tent (smaller than the whole of the digital humanities or of the social sciences, larger than a particular discipline) to explore strategies and frameworks for the collaborative care and use of research data of diverse types.
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