Group items tagged

This article looks at historical video games, which the author says "replaces representation with simulation and presence with virtuality, thereby marginalizing the oscillation of the modern historical imagination between historical facts and historic events, transcendence and immanence, representation and presence." An interesting perspective for examining collective memories, historical perspectives and forms of representation in interactive media and video games.

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.

[Synopsis] This book is a critical and ethnographic study of camgirls: women who broadcast themselves over the web for the general public while trying to cultivate a measure of celebrity in the process. The book's over-arching question is, "What does it mean for feminists to speak about the personal as political in a networked society that encourages women to 'represent' through confession, celebrity, and sexual display, but punishes too much visibility with conservative censure and backlash?" The narrative follows that of the camgirl phenomenon, beginning with the earliest experiments in personal homecamming and ending with the newest forms of identity and community being articulated through social networking sites like Live Journal, YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. It is grounded in interviews, performance analysis of events transpiring between camgirls and their viewers, and the author's own experiences as an ersatz camgirl while conducting the research.

This study (and its author) is mentioned in this week's reading 'Digital Ethnography : An Examination of the Use of New Technologies for Social Research' by Dhiraj Murthy. Dissertation Remarks and Synopsis (from Theresa Senft's website) http://www.terrisenft.net/diss/synopsis.php#remarks

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'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.

The Smithsonian using Second Life to create educational settings and museums. They are recreating real physical places such as Oaxaca, Mexico for people to go and explore cultural expressions of the people from that region of the world. Pretty interesting uses of this virtual reality

Here is a link to San Francisco's center for digital storytelling. The website has a digital storytelling cookbook, a basic guide to digital storytelling including interview techniques and basics of final cut express. The following is out of the "overloaded memory bank" section of the cookbook: "construction system to assist us in this process. Images, videos, sounds, and other representations of events from our life can help us to reconstruct more complete memories and therefore expand the repertoire of story that we can put to use." What are the implications for memory, and storytelling, if it is being framed in the context of a more formal recorded digital story.

and here is the link (http://www.storycenter.org/). There are several videos on the site that might be interesting to check out as well.

this is all you really need to read (abstract/chapter intro...): New technologies represent a system of constraints and possibilities that constitute the foundation of new rhetorical spaces: the spheres of new communicative and persuasive procedures. Nowadays, urban planning has the chance to critically and rigorously experiment with these new spaces. It has the chance to transgress traditional representational codes and to expand its semantic horizons. This chapter portrays one such challenging exploration: the fecund crossroads between qualitative analytical approaches and digital languages within the planning field. It is a path that embraces diverse dimensions media and messages, analysis and rhetoric, ethics and aesthetics.

I only read the first 15 pages or so of this chapter through Google Books preview - but - I loved it. It's beautifully written (jargon-y at times, but it's good for the genre). Plus, it works as a manifesto for the kinds digital ethnographies I want to read/experience. The best part for me was the author's focus on "multi -sensory aesthetics" in digital ethnographies. It's worth a block quote: Understanding that reason doesn't produce the totality of our actions, to create real communicative space, and induce peoples to act it is not enough to "tell" rather it is s necessary to transfer energies, make sentiments, and emotions vibrate, awaken latent aspirations, knowledge and enrages, rediscovering the powerful role of artistic and poetic languages. It is necessary to focus on the cognitive and communicative performance of aestehec pleasure, a pleasure that is not an accessory but rather a central moment of very communicative process.

This is the site of the photographer from the BBC News piece on "A 13-year-old eagle huntress in Mongolia." His own account is completely different from the BBC article. He is not, as BBC portrayed him, an ethnographer who stumbled onto a cultural shift in gendered activities-he is a storyteller who went looking for an unusual story, and made it happen. "I had gone looking for my eagle huntress. . .I was amazed by her comfort and ease as she began handling the grand eagle for the first time in her life." I have the same question I asked on the bookmark for the BBC article; why was it important to the BBC to represent this story as ethnography?

Agreed - and even without the quotes, a casual observer could tell that these images are posed. However, I think portraiture-as-documentary photography raises some intriguing methodological questions/concerns. Considering the original piece was published through a (well-respected) international media organization, my guess is that some interesting conversations occurred during editorial meetings regarding the nature of Svidensky's work. Maybe this example points to the blurring lines between traditional news photography and pictures made for ethnographic purposes?

Quite possibly. And if that is the case, it is certainly evident in the two contrasting articles we have here. But I also wonder if we're not watching a paradigm shift to the photo-essay style that Svidensky is making use of. With the rising popularity of sites like Buzzfeed, I wonder if--in order to bring more interest to his work--he's utilizing that same style in hopes of being more "readable" for the masses. What will be interesting, though, is if we see a similar shift to the photo-essay from the sites that push traditional news photography.