Group items tagged

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.

This is the parent organization for Map Knitter. They have open data archive, the site serves as a repository for mapping data.

A very simple and useful mapping tool.

I admit to loving cybercultural studies and web 1.0 aesthetics. This site has them both! It's a collection of visualizations and maps of "the internet" in terms of physical locations (cables, wireless towers, etc.), the conceptual, historical, and artistic. I'm not doing justice to the amount of geographical information presented here. It's worth noting that the site was maintained by UK-based geographer Martin Dodge (http://cyberbadger.blogspot.com/). I invite you to explore the historical and conceptual pages especially. How could these types of maps be integrated into our research?

This article is of interest (http://mappingonlinepublics.net/2012/04/27/twitter-and-disaster-resilience-lessons-from-qldfloods-and-eqnz/) I would be interested in taking the map of twitter usage or during as disaster and the doing ethnographic follow up after the factor the see how this resource was used. This might build a better picture of how to use social media during disasters/similar problems.

How very interesting. Could be a really valuable read. I'm very curious how their method/methodology changes from other content analysis work in online spaces. If they take into account the unique context of blog comments (trolls, etc.).

Wow! poked around just a little bit - great open-source tutorials on accessing census data, representing data in maps, creating news apps, coding, as well as some more manifesto-y pieces on new directions! "Source Guides are collections of tutorials, project discussions, and advice on topics of interest to developers and interactive designers in newsrooms. Is there a Guide topic missing that you'd like to see here?"

A crowdsourced mapping tool that promotes business transparency by tracking "where things come from". This tool creates a visualization of supply chains across the globe.

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!

Zeega is a non-profit inventing new forms of interactive storytelling. Our HTML5 platform makes it easy to combine original content with photos, videos, text, audio, data feeds and maps via APIs from across the web.

Here are two projects that I think are zeega projects. (http://eephusleague.com/magazine/) and (http://www.editsquarterly.com/) Not totally sure though, since they seem to run really easily on both computers I have tried to use it on and on firefox as well.

the concept of "deep maps" invokes multimedia, and stems from thinking anchored in 18th onto late 20th centuries...what shifts does 'digital' provide in this concept? what is the 21st century discussion like?

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?"

Beautifully crafted timelines that are easy, and intuitive to use. Document History Connected: Timeline is also great for pulling in media from different sources. It has built in support for pulling in Tweets and media from Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Vimeo, Google Maps and SoundCloud. More media types will be supported in the future. Timeline is open source and could be quite useful for mashing together different types of content associated with ethnography projects.

What a great tool, Ed! Thanks for sharing! Now I feel like I need to think of a project where I can use this.

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

From website: "This portal is a gateway to the cultural materials of Plateau peoples that are held in Washington State University's Libraries, Manuscripts, Archives and Special Collections (MASC), the Museum of Anthropology and by national donors. The collections represented here have been chosen and curated by tribal consultants working in cooperation with University and Museum staff." The About section has a good description of the curation process. In summary, the digital collection allows annotation and content submission by registered tribal members and organizations; also allows visitors and guests to leave text, audio, and video comments on content. The Tribal Links section for each category connects the historical content to contemporary cultures. Content controls allow participants to flag content as sensitive; presumably there is non-public content that is somehow managed. Here is a record that has some annotation by tribal organization: http://plateauportal.wsulibs.wsu.edu/html/ppp/display.php?tid=2&cid=4&fid=147&pgst=0 Metadata seems to include geospatial metadata that allows mapping of buildings, etc. From what I understand, the software used to support this collection is based on an Australian project with similar approach. Unfortunately, not much on the site about the software tools. I will try to locate and add the Australian project and related documentation. Is this digital ethnography? It seems to approach it; but limited markup by tribal members and organizations gives limited view of offline implications of online data.