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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...

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.

(39 Images of occupying Favelas in Rio de Janeiro that don't appear on TV) Here are some great pics of the police occupying the favelas or communities as most Cariocas (People from Rio) would preferred to call them out of respect. This is what they call 'pacification' where drug trafficking is eliminated and police enforcement is ever present. 

Here's another recent article on this from the Washington Post: RIO DE JANEIRO - Squatters occupying a complex of abandoned buildings in Rio de Janeiro clashed with police Friday after a court ruling that allowed the premises to be cleared. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/fighting-breaks-out-in-rio-de-janeiro-as-police-move-to-clear-5000-squatters-from-buildings/2014/04/11/047ade4e-c180-11e3-b574-f8748871856a_story.html.

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 site is a popular destination for anyone seeking to add a more creative visual aspect to research and/or presentations. Although it uses a wide array of kinetic typography, it is a great way to visually portray field data in a way that attracts a wider audience.