Group items tagged

ABSTRACT: This article provides an account of the question of method as it relates to collective modes of research organised, conceived and produced through the interplay between digital technologies of communication and offline strategies of investigation. It does so by exploring the orchestration of research platforms, which are mediating devices that constitute the production of knowledge across a range of geocultural settings. In the context of a project entitled Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders, the article maintains that research methods must contend with the ideological, technological and economic instruments that condition knowledge production at the current conjuncture. The platform, we argue, operates as a medium through which research, labour, subjectivity and knowledge are shaped in ways specific to hardware settings, software dynamics and the materialities of labour and life.

I was looking back at this (really interesting) multimedia writing work by Anne Wysocki and noticed how many of the pieces required special players and ample download time/space - Flash Player, Shockwave Player, 1.5 MB of download space - which got me thinking about platform/storage restrictions and digital accessibility. In many instances, a researcher may need not only specific digital skills/knowledge, but also specific platforms, players, software, memory space, etc. to conduct her work. And as players, platforms, software, etc. are upgraded, older digital texts may become less accessible. On that note, I have been taking screen shots of all of the scenes in the Facebook game I'm currently studying. Why? One reason is so I can put these screen shots into a presentation, but the more pressing reason is that another game I'm really interested in looking at (Food Force, a social media game from 2005 - so ancient, right?) is no longer accessible. In its place is a Facebook page with a big bandaged thumb and a "Sorry! This page has been removed." message. An ethnography conducted in a digital space, it seems, requires just as much "recording" as one in an offline space.

The life and preservation of the digital world is a huge question, and one that I don't think enough people are considering. I see more and more of my friends taking all their photos with smartphones and loading them to Instagram or Facebook, or worse never moving them beyond their phones. I wonder what photos will have survived in 20 years when their children are looking to make wedding or anniversary slide shows, or simply becoming interested in their own pasts. There are no hard copies of these images, and while hard copies are vulnerable, so are digital copies for a number of reasons.

great points in this discussion, especially around issues of "access"...which range from having the "right" tech to get into a site to ADA regulations/requirements. Also, preservation is a complicated facet of access and one worth discussing seriously in this course as we think about digital data.

This article is really dense, bringing in a framework of participatory democratic society into on-line platforms. It is interesting concept but I have not been able to discern what the pilot project "Mobile Phones, Risk and Health" is about. Nonetheless, it poses good questions about who analyzes and constructs the data, the participants or the social scientist?

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.

What is this? All Our Ideas is a platform that enables groups to collect and prioritize ideas in a transparent, democratic, and bottom-up way. It's a suggestion box for the digital age.

Translating physical places into digital interactive platforms. This is allowing to transcend time and space timelines, bringing stories from the past and liking them to the relevance of present places.

This is fascinating work. I'm looking forward to exploring this further - particularly the socially-engaged content that is described in the mission statement. It is amazing to think of the amount of data that is available to modern researchers. Kudos to USC and UCLA.

Nice summary of both advantages and disadvantages of dedoose. Although I have mentioned some points (e.g. cross-platform) during my presentation, there are some other features that I have not covered - the visualisation function and the issue of no local copy.

This is the digital arm of the diy zine archiving project I have been involved with for years. Check out the about section for explanations of collective structure, tools used to build the site, and connection to other diy archives.

Super cool project, Mara! I like how the mission statement notes that QZAP is a "living history," and that the members are also documenting the history of hardware/software used to create this digital platform where the archived history of these zines lives. (I'm not sure if that last sentence makes sense, but hopefully you know what I mean...)

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

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!

VersuS is a series of works about the possibility to listen in real-time to the emotions, expressions and information generated by users on social network and using ubiquitous technologies, and to publish them onto the cities which they are related to. A scenario emerges according to which it becomes possible to realize information landscapes which are ubiquitously accessible and which change our experience or urban spaces. These projects also suggest the possibility to use these methodologies and technologies to promote novel forms of participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design.

Interesting how this intersects with Meta-Nerd's idea of "scenes." The video is interesting - it plays without sound, and provides very little context (sns platforms, time scales, etc). For me, this made the video less a visualization of data than a weird, undulating monster (or earthquake? Why am I using negative metaphors?). Without the context, it veers away from a piece that will make an argument about the role of social media "in today's society." I appreciate that, even as I want to critique the video for not providing the promised "participatory practices in urban spaces, for decision-making, policy-making and urban planning and design."

This is quite fascinating! The notion of mapping conversations on social networks with /place/ opens many pathways to exploration and innovation. I wonder if the 3D visualization software will be released to the open source community.

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?"

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."

Digest of larger post of big study by International Telecommunication Union about mobile broadband use...

This is report does provide a sense of how mobile broadband is spreading globally. However, I wonder if this is necessarily a "good" thing. Sure, we could argue that eventually the spread of these technologies will happen, but is the source censored or monitored in any way? Is it available to "all" without loss of content or as a democratic platform for those in marginal communities?

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